Fort Manoel

Where it sits. Fort Manoel stands on Manoel Island, in the middle of Marsamxett Harbour, commanding the anchorage of Sliema Creek and looking straight across the water at the northwestern flank of Valletta. It is a square work with a pentagonal bastion at each corner — the classic star-fort plan — and its four bastions carry the names St Helen, St Anthony, St John and Notre Dame. St Helen and St Anthony face the sea and the capital; St John and Notre Dame cover the landward approach and are each backed by a low cavalier, with a largely rock-hewn pentagonal ravelin in front of the curtain between them. The main gate, in the seaward curtain, is screened by a lunette known as the Couvre Porte.

Why it took 150 years to build. The Order of St John understood the vulnerability almost as soon as Valletta was finished: an enemy holding the islet in Marsamxett could bombard the new city at leisure. A fort was proposed as early as 1569 by Francesco Collignon, and the warning was repeated by the Spanish engineer Scipione Campi in 1577 and by others in 1582. Antonio Maurizio Valperga offered a hexagonal Dutch-style design with a hornwork in 1670; the Flemish engineer Carlos de Grunenbergh proposed a four-bastioned fort with a ravelin, ditch and faussebraye in 1687. In 1715 the knight René Jacob de Tigné and a French team drew up several further schemes. Money, not ideas, was the obstacle.

Construction and the men behind it. The final design, agreed in 1723, combined de Tigné's work with that of Charles François de Mondion, the Order's engineer. Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena paid for it himself, gave it his name, and endowed the Manoel Foundation to maintain and garrison it. He laid the first stone on 14 September 1723. Work moved fast: the enceinte, cavaliers and gateway were complete by 1727, the ditch excavated by 1732, and the chapel, barracks, magazines and countermines finished around 1733, with the fort operational by 1734. Mondion died in 1733 and was buried in the crypt beneath the chapel he had designed. By 1761 the Comte de Bourlamaque was calling it a model of careful fortification. Its outwork, Lembi Battery, was added near Tigné in 1757 to stop an enemy shooting into the fort's northern flank.

The Baroque interior. What distinguishes Fort Manoel from most military architecture of its date is that it was built to be looked at. The parade ground is a formal piazza, arcaded on its long sides, with barrack blocks, an armoury and, at its centre, the chapel of St Anthony of Padua — destroyed by wartime bombing and rebuilt during the restoration. A bronze statue of Vilhena, plausibly by Pietro Paolo Troisi, once stood in the square; it was removed in the nineteenth century and, after a further move, now stands in Floriana.

Occupation, empire and war. The French took the fort in June 1798 after Grand Master Hompesch capitulated; during the subsequent Maltese insurrection the rebels built batteries at Għargħar and Sqaq Cappara to shell it, and a French sortie from the fort against an insurgent gun position at San Ġwann was repelled on 12 September 1799. The British formally took over in September 1800 and stayed until 1964. They dismantled the echaugettes on the Valletta-facing bastions to make room for gun positions, demolished the magazine on St Anthony Bastion for three quick-firing 12-pounders, decommissioned the guns in 1906, and in the Second World War ringed the fort with 3.7-inch heavy anti-aircraft guns. Bombing wrecked the ramparts, barracks and chapel. Restoration began in August 2001; the piazza and rebuilt chapel were completed in 2009 and the outer works approved in 2012, the whole programme together with Fort Tigné costing around €30 million. The fort has been on Malta's tentative UNESCO list since 1998 as part of the Knights' harbour fortifications.

On screen, and after dark. The parade ground and its arcades stood in for the plaza of the Great Sept of Baelor in the first season of Game of Thrones, filmed on Malta in 2010, and the space is instantly recognisable to anyone who has watched the closing episodes. The fort also carries one of the island's better-known ghost stories: the Black Knight, in the armour of the Order and said to resemble Vilhena, reported near the ruined chapel from the 1940s onward. Access is on foot across the Gżira bridge; the low sun of late afternoon is what the honey-coloured stonework was built for.