Tag Archives: fort ticonderoga

Saturday 13th September 2025 – JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT …

… last night, I suddenly awoke, with another one of these quite dramatic awakenings.

And about five seconds after I awoke, I received a message on the telephone. It really was an astonishing coincidence, almost as if awakening five seconds before the message was in anticipation of its arrival.

It wasn’t all that much beforehand that I’d actually come to bed, after another one of the slow, depressing evenings that I seem to be having these days. And I was so tired, yet again, that I must have gone off quite rapidly to sleep. It’s a shame that I couldn’t have remained asleep, though, but then that’s what usually happens.

It took an age to go back to sleep too, but once I’d slipped into the arms of Morpheus, there I stayed until the alarm sounded. And that woke me up quite dramatically too, I can tell you.

At that moment, we were back in World War I when the Germans were storming a trench full of Greek soldiers. They had launched a few shells into a few Greek pill-boxes and stormed the trenches. There were piles of dead people around, so they went through, identified the wounded and shot them on the spot. There was one person who was a British officer leading a Greek troop. They questioned him about a few different things but as he didn’t have the correct answers to what they wanted, they shot him too. But we were working somewhere behind the lines, watching a captive balloon or Zeppelin or something that had escaped from its moorings and was flying at a very low height around the edge of the cliffs. We were worried that it would collide with the church steeple, so we were trying to work out a way, if we could, of diverting it away because if we were to fire at it, it would explode and that would make more damage. In the meantime, we had been repairing a few watches and things like that. We actually had one working, but then we decided that we weren’t happy so we dismantled it to have another attempt. At this moment, the girls came along and looked at what we were doing. They couldn’t understand why we had decided to do it a second time. I was talking to one of the guys about new technology and how powerful it was. He was saying that how he wished that he had bought a new 2GB memory stick while their prices were low, because a new 2GB one these days would cost $64. I replied that a 64GB one would only cost $2, the way that technology is going these days.

There’s a bit of everything in there. The bit about colliding with the steeple relates to a discussion that I had the other day with one of the taxi drivers, when we were watching the Nazguls flying around near the spire of the Eglise Notre Dame de Lihou. As for the rest, it seems to relate to little snippets of conversation that I’ve had now and again with different people.

After the bathroom and the medication, I came back in here to transcribe the dictaphone notes, but as you have already read them, I needn’t have bothered mentioning it.

The nurse was next, still in his cheerful mood, and then it was breakfast and a new book.

While I was reading COLONEL CARRINGTON’S TESTIMONY, I noticed that he had written several others and so I began today to read his BATTLE MAPS AND CHARTS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that IN 2013 and 2014 I roamed up and down the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York visiting the sites of the battles of the Revolutionary War and also of the Seven Years War of 1756-1763, including the site of Fort William Henry, the fort that featured prominently in Fenimore Cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS

One of the places that I visited in 2013 was Fort Ticonderoga, and I noticed from Carrington’s description of the siege of the fort that "The Americans neglected to fortify Sugar Loaf Hill", a prominent eminence overlooking the fort, ⁣strong>"deeming it inaccessible.".

You probably noticed just now that STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I walked quite comfortably to the top, and so did several other people. And there’s still a British cannon up there that the British Army managed to drag up the hill.

After breakfast, I came in here to begin a new radio programme, and in fact I’m currently working on two of them right now because, halfway through choosing the music for one, I realised that I’d missed one. Still, variety is the spice of life.

When my faithful cleaner came down to apply my anaesthetic cream, she brought with her my electronic drum kit. That was a one-day wonder, that was. I bought it as a challenge, something to do during lockdown, but my legs gave out before I was able to master it.

It was the boss who came to fetch me today and we had quite a quick drive down to Avranches. I was connected up quite quickly too and then I could concentrate on Y Barri v Y Bala.

Y Bala had only conceded four goals all season up to date, but Y Barri doubled that total with comparative ease and could (and should) have had a bagful more except for the inspired performance of former Salford City goalkeeper Joel Torrance.

It was nevertheless an exciting game and you can see the highlights HERE if you are of such a mind.

Although I finished my dialysis earlier than usual, I had to wait to be unplugged, and then finally the boss brought me back in the most astonishing rainstorm that was engulfing Avranches.

Ironically, it wasn’t raining at Granville when I returned. It was a nice, leisurely walk back to my apartment in the howling gale, which has now been blowing for several days.

For a change, Tea tonight was a burger with baked potato – one of those luxury burgers that are really delicious. And now, I’m off to bed in the hope of a good lie-in tomorrow. I need one after all of this.

But I forgot to mention my ‘phone message from during the night. It reads "(we) will see you Friday November 7 for a few days fly back on November 11.". This visit from Canada looks as if it may well be happening.

But seeing as we have been talking about Ticonderoga and The Last of the Mohicans … "well, one of us has" – ed … it was at Ticonderoga where I told my famous story to one of the American tour guides.
Sent on a spying mission by Colonel Munro to find out about the French forces in Fort Ticonderoga, Hawkeye and Chingachgook approach the fort very carefully
"How many soldiers do you think there are in the fort?" asked Hawkeye.
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground. "About 300" he replied
"And how many cannon?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground again. "About 30"
"And how many horses?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground yet again. "About 60"
"And how many native allies?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground once more. "About 200"
"That’s incredible" said Hawkeye. "Can you tell all that by just lying down and listening to the ground?"
"Ohh no" replied Chingachgook. "If I lie down here like this and turn my head so that my ear is to the ground just like this, I can see right underneath the gates of the fort"
The response of the tour guide was "that’s incredible! I never knew that Hawkeye and Chingachgook came to Ticonderoga. I shall have to amend the tourist leaflets."
Which just goes to show, as Alfred Hitchcock and Kenneth Williams once famously said, "it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners."

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Monday 13th November 2023 – ONE THING THAT …

… can actually be said for today was that no-one came along to interrupt me. And it’s not every day that that happens.

Not that it made a great deal of difference because for about an hour at some point during the morning I was off in the Arms of Morpheus.

What I blame it on was another bad night. Not that there was all that much going on during the hours of darkness but I was awake for quite some time – unable to go back to sleep once I awoke.

And that happened a couple of times too.

It was another slow start to the day, characterised by the length of time that it took to actually find my feet. I beat the second alarm of course, but it didn’t feel like it all that much.

After the medication and checking my mails I had a listen to the dictaphone. At one point I awoke in the middle of the night and found myself saying “on the dream in the the” a few times, one after the other and I can’t think what on earth it was that I was supposed to be saying or doing, or why.

Later on we were in the north-east of Manchester for a football match between Rochdale and Oldham Athletic. There was something that happened on a street corner somewhere which ended up with a young girl being pushed or falling under the wheels of a vehicle passing by on the road and was killed. I can’t remember any more about why she was there or what she was doing

And then I’d been doing some kind of course where every week I’d receive some kind of loose-leaf notes to put into a binder. Being my usual self I’d not filed them away in the binder for several weeks. Now I had them all confused and mixed up. To my surprise there was no indication on each of the pages to exactly which week it belongs so apart from the font which was different on one or two examples there was really no way of being able to sort the pages back out into the correct order. I did have a look to see if there were any printers’ codes at the foot of the documents on each page but that didn’t seem to be of any particular help either so I was sitting there scratching my head wondering what I was going to do about it.

At another point I went round visiting someone on the Coleridge Way estate in Crewe – a woman but not Nerina. We’d been discussing some things that had been going on at night school where we attended. For some reason things were running really early so I thought that I’d go for a walk. I ended up losing my way. I left the estate a long time ago and was roaming around on top of a moor with these old, tiny Victorian semi-detached houses. I went down one street which was a cul-de-sac to the end where there was a garage. I went in and there were all kinds of books, CDs and DVDs there. I picked up an armful and began to leave. I kept on dropping them and to my surprise I could actually kneel down on one knee, pick them up and stand up again. While I was looking around for a carrier bag or something in which to put them the guy came back. I recognised him from night school so I said “those books and things about which you told me, I’ve come to pick them up”. I could see the look of bewilderment on his face but I stood there and brazened it out. he made a few remarks but I didn’t pay much attention. After I’d said hello to his wife and sister or someone I set off, only to find that I was even more lost than I was before I’d come across this house. I didn’t know where I was or how I was going to go down to this housing estate. It seemed as if I’d been gone for hours and it was going dark now.

And finally I was in Chester preparing to go to night school but I didn’t feel like it. No-one else whom I knew was planning to go. Instead I went for a wander and ended up walking down a huge corridor going through these gym classrooms etc. When I reached one particular window there was a group of people looking outside. There was a golf course and quite a few people had set up their tents around the tees. The wind was so strong that some of them were being blown away. I explained to a girl there that everything is possible in Saudi Arabia these days. These people have tents with remote controls. Every time that they move onto the next hole they press a button and their tent follows them. Someone burst out laughing. It was the guy with her who happened to be the guy who was also going to night school who had given me those books and DVDs etc for Cécile to which I’d helped myself the other day. He asked about them and I said that they were still in my car. I hadn’t seen her yet. I explained to the girl about the situation. He produced another book that he said that I’d forgotten. I said that I’d add it to the rest of the stuff.

That part of the dream reminded me of the time that Beebee Daniels told me that Ben Lyon, her husband, used to always take her with him when he went to play golf. When asked why she replied “whenever he hit his ball into a bunker I would have to make camp”.

But the bit about the remote control reminded me of a story that I once told IN TROIS RIVIÈRES IN QUÉBÉC when someone asked me to explain the lack of success of Manchester United after Alex Ferguson left. I explained that at Old Trafford the goals were on wheels and when Ferguson retired he took the remote control with him.

But as Kenneth Williams and Alfred Hitchcock once famously remarked, “it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners”

Of course, I won’t ever forget the story that I told to that American tourist information officer at Fort Ticonderoga when STRAWBERRY MOOSE and I worked our way up the Hudson Valley all those years ago visiting all the sites of the Seven Years War and the Revolutionary War.

I told him about the time that Hawkeye and Chingachgook were around there on a spying expedition for the British
How many soldiers do you see in the fort?" asked Hawkeye.
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground. About 300" he replied
And how many cannon?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground again. About 30"
And how many horses?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground yet again. About 60"
And how many native allies?"
Chingachgook lay down and put his ear to the ground once more. About 200"
That’s incredible" said Hawkeye. Can you tell all that by just lying down and listening to the ground?"
Ohh no" replied Chingachgook. If I lie down here like this and turn my head so that my ear is to the ground just like this, I can see right underneath the gates of the fort"

When I finished my little story the Tourist Officer looked at me. "Do you know? That’s astonishing. I never ever knew that Hawkeye and Chingachgook came to Ticonderoga. I’ll remember that story and add it in to the next revision of our guide."

Regular readers of this rubbish from our University Days will recall the astonishing story of Colin Lusk and his “Understanding Irony” course that he marketed in the USA.

There have been a few chats on line today. Liz and I had a good chat about molasses, golden syrup and treacle. And Jackie sent me some moral support from Köln.

People have often asked why I don’t send much moral support to people and the answer is, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that “moral” is not a word that is usually associated with any support that I would ever send anyone.

So, what work have I been up to today?

Firstly, I had to make some garlic butter seeing as I have now run out. And I’ll tell you something for nothing – and that is that if I put some of this on my garlic bread, I won’t have to worry about werewolves and vampires coming to visit me.

And then, having finished writing my notes about my voyage to Canada last year, I’ve made a start on editing the photos. And when they are finished I’ll add them in. Right now I’m struggling up the Matapedia Valley away from the St Lawrence and going over the Alleghenies to the Baie des Chaleurs.

There aren’t all that many photos as there usually are – certainly nothing at all like the 6,000 photos that I took in my four months in the High Arctic in 2019 and which I still haven’t finished editing – and for several reasons really.

The first is that I was struggling to stand upright and some of the photos are extremely blurred accordingly because I didn’t have the strength to hold the camera steady

And secondly, For the greater part of the time I was far too ill to go out anywhere.

In between everything I made a start on writing the notes for the next series of radio programmes and I’m now about a third of the way through it. It won’t be finished tomorrow because apart from having my Welsh lesson and my visit to the Centre de Re-education, I have a appointment with these people from these Autonomy people so I need to prepare some paperwork.

Tea tonight was a stuffed pepper with pasta and veg. And having prepared the stuffing as I usually do, there wasn’t enough as there usually is. I think that I might have forgotten an ingredient but I can’t for the life of me think what it might be.

Having finished my notes I might even have an early night ready for tomorrow. And hope that I can make the most of it.

But what with them coming to talk to me and the ergotherapist coming to visit me, things are moving rapidly. I only wish that I was.

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Thursday 3rd October 2013 – STRAWBERRY MOOSE …

strawberry moose mount defiance fort ticonderoga lake champlain new york usamans … "persons!" – ed … a British 12-pounder gun that was dragged to the top of Mount Defiance by a troop of General Burgoyne’s artillery with the aim … "ohh, well done!" – ed … of threatening the American rebels in the fort way below on the promontory on Lake Champlain.

It just goes to show you the power that modern artillery posed back in the early modern era because I doubt very much whether any cannon in the British artillery train, and certainly not a 12-pounder, would have had the effective (or even the absolute) range to do anything like any serious damage to the fort.

Don’t forget that these forts are not like early medieval castles, built of stone walls, where a few 14th- and 15th Century cannon balls could send them crashing down. These fortresses might be faced outside and inside with stone (or even wood) but in between the facings was often as much as 24 feet of earth or sand and any cannon ball, explosive or otherwise, would be merely smothered. At Fort William Henry they were firing point-blank (like 150 yards) with all the artillery that Moncalm had and the only reason that the fort’s north-western bastion collapsed was because a lit howitzer shell from outside landed in an opened box of fused shells on the parapet. And even that wasn’t enough to breach the walls – it simply showed Munro that the writing was on the walls.

artillery crew strawberry moose mount defiance fort ticonderoga lake champlain new york usaOf course Strawberry Moose was not alone up here. He recruited a very keen and willing artillery crew from amongst the local residents out for an early morning hike, and they were only too ready to help him in his exploits with his weapon.

With one volunteer being worth ten men, it was certainly enough to put the wind up the American rebels down in the fort below and they soon fled across the lake into Vermont. But seriously, I cannot imagine whatever was going through the mind of the commander of the fort that he didn’t put a detachment of his men up here to stop the British from taking the position and threatening the fort. Overconfidence?

rogers rock new york state campground lake george USAI did promise you all yesterday that I would show you a photo of my camp site from last night, and you won’t be disappointed, because I wasn’t. This is Rogers Rock campsite on the very northern edge of Lake George and it is one of the most spectacular places in which I’ve slept (strangely enough, of my “top 10”, every one of them is in North America).

As for Rogers, he was someone who became totally disillusioned with the British tactics of marching in fours, dressed in bright red uniforms, through the forests around here. He recruited a band of volunteers, called them “Rogers’ Rangers”, and dressed them in greens and browns. Then he sent them crawling through the forest to wreak havoc and destruction amongst the French military, their native Algonquin allies, and the Frech settlers who had settled around the head of Lake George in defiance of the treaty of Utrecht of 1713.

From there I drove on across the pass and the old portage to Crown Point, where Lake Champlain narrows to about half a mile. Crown Point actually faces north rather than south and so once the French had abandoned Fort Carillon (as Fort Ticonderoga was known) in order to defend Montreal after the fall of Quebec and the loss of Montcalm’s army in 1759, the British dashed here to where the French formerly had a trading post (Fort St Frederic) to take possession.

crown point fort amherst lake champlain new york usaHere, they started to build what would have been the largest fortress in the whole of North America and in a rush that would have put modern builders to shame, they were well on the way to completing it when the dramatic collapse of French military resistance in North America in 1760 meant that the fort was no longer necessary. After all, who could have foreseen the American Revolution?

The fort was built much more substantially than this, but a chimney fire in one of the barracks went out of control and set alight the armoury, wherein was stored most of the British munitions, including a couple of tons of gunpowder. The subsequent explosion atomised the armoury and set everything else alight, including the timber cross-bracing within the earthen walls and so there was a subterranean fire that went on for weeks until everything was consumed.

champlain bridge lake champlain new york vermont usaThere’s a bridge here too – the Champlain Bridge, that crosses the lake into Vermont (I was in Vermont when I took this photo). Pretty though this bridge might be, it’s not a patch on the one that used to be here. That was a graceful steel lattice-girder bridge that was totally innovative in the 1920s when it as built, but the techniques used went on to be standard bridge-building practice until the advent of (yeeuucchhh) concrete bridges.

Accordingly it was classed as a National Monument in 2009 and a team of experts was sent to examine the bridge and make an inventory. What they found so horrified them that the bridge was immediately closed and demolished, for it seems that in the confusion about who actually owned the bridge, there had never been an inspection or even five minutes of maintenance of the structure since the day that it was built.

So tomorrow, I’ll show you this evening’s camp site and you can see what you think of that.

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Wednesday 2nd October 2013 – I WAS ON THE ROAD EARLY THIS MORNING

So much so that if it wouldn’t have given me a guilty conscience I would have avoided paying the camp site fees. There was no-one around when i arrived, and no-one around when I was about to leave either. However, earlier in the morning, the patrolling ranger hand come by to chat to me because I wasn’t on his list, and he reminded me to pay at the gate “but you look like the honest sort anyway” – which just goes to show that they don’t know me very well around here.

fish road rainbow bay lake george new york usaI’ve been following Lake George northwards towards the head of the lake. Lake George is a cleft in the earth between two rather large solid lumps of limestone and this is another one of those places that quailfies for the Most Beautiful Places on Earth and as you can see.

Some of the views are stunning, specially when you consider that we are now in autumn and the leaves are turning. It’s definitely the best time to be here

boltons landing lake george new york usaI wouldn’t be here in the high summer though. It’s terribly trendy and frightfully twee, with the worst kind of boutiques all over the place, including the “Indian tepee” where you can buy genuine First-Nation artefacts, all dutifully stamped ‘made in China”.

That of course does remind me of the Indian who won first prize at the Boston Tea Party all those years ago. He was found next morning drowned in his tepee.

I did however meet a guy who, like me, lives with nothing but his solar panels and wind turbines, and runs his truck (an ancient Ford F250) on biodiesel. We had an extremely lengthy chat about all kinds of things, but going back to this summer thing, he was telling me that in the summer the population here is over 30,000 – but in winter they struggle to make 2,000.

silver bay YMCA camp lake george new york usaFurther along the Lake is a place called Silver Bay, and my first opinion was that it was one of those places that had “Strength Through Joy” that you found in Germany in the 1930s, churning out little Master Race clones, written all over it.

It turns out that I wasn’t all that far out either because further enquiry revealed that it is in fact a YMCA summer camp. Although I could do with getting myself clean and having a good meal, I didn’t want to hang out with all the boys and so I resolved to no hang around too long. But they get their money’s worth from a place like this.

As an aside, I should mention of course that out of season when there are no paying customers, the YMCA, so I was told, does open its doors to deprived children from the inner cities to give them a break, give them an experience of the countryside, and teach them leadership skills.

waterfront lot for sale lake george new york usaI made a few stops off along the route, for a variety of reasons, one of which was to look at this. It’s a tiny little waterfront lot with enough room to just about park a car and trailer, a storage shed, a boat ramp and a small dock.

The view from here is totally stunning as you can see, and furthermore, it’s for sale. I’ve determined to find out the price of the lot and if you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s because I’ll be lying down in a darkened room recovering.

fort ticonderoga lake champlain new york usaBut really why I’m here of course is to visit Fort Ticonderoga, or Fort Carillon as it was known when it was in French hands (even though in “The Last of the Mohicans” they insisted on calling it Fort Ticonderoga throughout). It’s the scene of several abject British military disasters and when you read this litany of errors it really does make you wonder how come the British managed to rule a quarter of the globe.

Failing to sweep away a defensive line from behind an earthen bank when you have a numerical superiority of over 4 to 1 and so abandoning a battle, even though your casualties are no more excessive than the defenders’. Or else a sentry fleeing from a charge of half a dozen enemy scouts, dashing into the fort to seek safety, and forgetting to close the gate behind him. I can go on and on … "not with a bayonet through your neck you can’t" – ed .

lake champlain lake george fort ticonderoga new york vermont usaThe purpose of Fort Ticonderoga was to control the entry from Montreal down into the Hudson Valley to New York (or, more precisely, the reverse of that route). That’s Lake Champlain right there ahead of us in this photo taken with the sun streaming into the lens of the camera (sorry about that), and that on the right is the river that goes into the interior where there are several portages and then you reach Lake George. All the river traffic that travelled between New York and Montreal – freight as well as British soldiers on the way to attack Montreal – had to come out of that little bay on the right.

Of course, when Fort Ticonderoga was finally captured by British (it wasn’t, by the way, despite what British history books might say – the French abandoned it round about the time that Québec fell to the British under General Wolfe) it served no useful purpose and so a further fort – Crown Point – was commenced a few miles further north and this time, facing northwards to watch out for the French advancing from the North to try to retake their possessions around here.

However, the rather dramatic collapse of the French in Upper Canada in 1759-60 rendered that fort unnecessary so some rather half-built ruins are all that remain. They are said to be in a spectacular setting and so that’s where I’m off to tomorrow.

But tomorrow morning I’ll show you all a photo of the view from my “bedroom” window here at Ticonderoga.

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