The Lochnagar Crater

This is not technically a fort per se, but I guess it falls under the category of 'improvised earthworks'. Way back in WW1, the Brits tried to blast their way through the Boche lines in Northern France with a brace of 24-ton subterranean mines (dubbed the 'Lochnagar' and the 'Y-Sap'). Witnesses reported that the explosion kicked up a plume of dirt 4000 feet into the "repercussing air". As you might expect, huge craters resulted, one of which (Lochnagar's handiwork) has been preserved as a monument.


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Northern France has crappy Google resolution, but here's another image from Wikipedia that gives you a sense of the scale of this thing. Those little things clustered around the cross on the far rim are people getting their tourisme on. You can also see the trails where the local kids ride their bikes - wheeeee!

Anyway, after the Lochnagar and the Y-Sap went off, the Brits went over the top and pushed into no-man's-land. The Krauts were shook up enough that their counterattack was slow, so the Brits made some progress at first. Eventually things got a little hairy, at which point a batallion of doughboys (named even in official correspondence as "Grimsby's Chums" because they all went to the same twitwad boarding school in Yorkshire) jumped into the Lochnagar Crater while trying to avoid the many, many maschinengewehrs being fired at them. Apparently they also got shelled a little bit by their own artillery by accident, but in fairness, this thing is total fusilier-bait.

I would suggest you bring your British friend who went to a twitwad boarding school (mine is named Henry), but it seems the Grimsby's Chums suffered 83% casualties on that day so it might be kind of a downer. Instead I would bring a medium-sized retriever or a sheepdog that would just run the heck all around in the crater and have the best time ever.