Chateau L’Etoc, which is now used as a summer event venue and residential accommodation, is on the market for the first time since the 1930s.
The current owner of the 20-bedroom, five-bathroom property, Caroline Kay-Mouat, spent a large part of her childhood and adulthood at the fort.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, she said that it was the most extraordinary place.
‘With all this nature, the sea and the sky, there is a real feeling of freedom,’ she said.
‘You feel very alive but you also feel very detached from the madness of every day.’
The property sits next to Alderney’s coastline, with 1,700 sq m of internal space and 5.75 acres of fortified grounds, dotted with stone vaulted rooms, ramparts and remnants of its military past. It is surrounded by the sea on three sides.
It is on the market with UK estate agency Harding Green.
‘The bays are glorious and just next to the fort there is the best lobster patch. As children we used to go out with my dad who would row us about in a little fishing boat,’ said Ms Kay-Mouat.
‘We’ve had parties with 400 people just milling all over the place and it didn’t even feel full. It is quite incredible. For someone with an imagination, they would just have so much fun.’
In Alderney’s 2017 Land Use Plan, Chateau L’Etoc was designated as an ‘area of opportunity’ and was formally registered as a heritage asset.
The fort, commissioned by Queen Victoria and completed in 1853, was designed to defend Alderney from invasion, and was able to house 128 soldiers and 23 guns.
When the fort was constructed, sappers uncovered burial chambers, human remains and pottery, much of which was reportedly thrown over the ramparts into the sea.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited the site in 1854.
About 15 years after the end of the First World War, Chateau L’Etoc was purchased by Vera and Charles Kay-Mouat from the Channel Islands Granite Company.
Over the course of the Second World War, five additional gunning emplacements, three cement reinforced bunkers and three search lights were added to the fort to reinforce the Nazi’s defensive capabilities on the very tip of the north-west corner of the island. After WWII, Chateau L’Etoc was primarily used to house soldiers who were clearing mines and debris from the Occupation. Some years after WWII, a feature in Country Life which dealt with all the many forts in Alderney stated that the original 1850s fortifications ‘were obsolete before they were even finished...the only scars that any of the stonework bears, apart from those of age, are the wounds caused by Germans, practising gun fire from their own heavily-functional island fortifications’.
Returning to Alderney after the Occupation, and with the fort having been handed back to the Kay-Mouats, Vera and Charles began using it as residential accommodation. It has been in the family ever since.
In 1980, Jon Kay-Mouat inherited Chateau L’Etoc before passing it onto Caroline and her husband, Andrew Theobald, in 2010.
The property has been advertised as having potential for private retreats, celebrations, corporate gatherings, boutique weddings and cultural events, art exhibitions and heritage experiences.
‘Chateau L’Etoc commands panoramic views across Alderney and the Channel, perfectly framed by Sale Bay, Arch Bay and Corblets Bay [and] occupies the island’s most northerly point, a location of unrivalled natural beauty, privacy and strategic prominence,’ said Harding Green in its listing.
It described the fort as ‘a rare canvas for sympathetic redevelopment or adaptive reuse’ and said that planning permission was in place for a two-storey glazed link between the officers’ quarters and the magazine store.
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