Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXX

[Lvl 2 Expert]

One thing I only just noticed about Heusden, after remembering looking up some stuff (on the Dutch Wikipedia) I remembered having heard of: it is very much an "oud-Nederlands vestingstelsel" design. Around 1685 there was a rethink of how these fortifications should be done. In this new style you often see large bastions with an arrow shape, built-in firing slits/grooves/casemates for the cannons and often a steep stone finish as the outer wall. (So yes, I picked an old style example accidentally on purpose.) But the biggest difference might be the advice to limit the elements outside of the moat, typically having only a single "glacis" outside of the moat. These guidelines were never applied consistently across projects, every head engineer, mayor or officer probably had their own ideas, and you're still working with the local terrain. But I would still hazard a guess that Heusden hasn't seen a major refit after 1700. So while functional it wouldn't have been the flagship of the fortifications fleet around 1800.





It's not a foolproof method of identifying fortifications, Naarden for instance has been updated and is today seen as the best surviving example of the new system, but it still has a bunch of stuff in front of the main moat.



In later years more smaller forts were build rather than/in addition to these "vestingen", as part of (water) lines or as the defenses for cities too large to wall into a nice single vesting. Fort Ruigenhoek wasn't build until 1870. It still includes the earthen bullet stopper walls, although more stone is clearly visible here too.