page_title: Levant Battery
section_title: Recent history
hierarchical_section_title: Levant Battery / Recent history
caption_attribution_description: English: The gun and mount from the Levant Battery in Gibraltar. Photo taken with the kind permission of Metalrok Limited. Levant Battery is located at the southern end of the Upper Rock Nature Reserve, on Windmill Hill positioned below the observation post Fire Control South. Levant Battery received its name from its position below the Levanter cloud which can be a common and localised meteorological occurence in Gibraltar. The position of Levant Battery afforded it an unobstructed field of view when other, higher batteries, such as, Spur, O'Hara's, Lord Airey's, and Breakneck were limited by reduced visibility from the cloud. The Gun barrel and mount pictured here was dismantled and removed from Levant Battery approximately 40 years ago and has been resting on its original trailer at Metalrok scrapyard since then.
context_page_description: Levant Battery is an artillery battery in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. It is located on Windmill Hill, at the southern end of the Upper Rock Nature Reserve, below observation post Fire Control South. It was named after the Levanter cloud, below which it perched, giving it an unobstructed view. Construction started in 1901 and, by 1903, a 9.2-inch Mark X breech-loading gun had been mounted. The battery was decommissioned in the 1970s and the gun was later removed, to rest in a scrap yard. A community group has been formed to garner support for the gun's recovery and restoration.
context_section_description: Gibraltar's surviving 9.2-inch guns were described in After The Battle magazine:
  ... the crowning glory of the defenses of the Rock are the 9.2-inch guns. Five batteries still remain on the Rock: Levant, Spur, Breakneck, O'Hara's and Lord Airey's Batteries. Of these, only Levant Battery can easily be visited, the others being situated on military property behind locked gates. All of them are single-gun batteries each with a 9.2-inch gun, a type of weapon that was once one of the most important weapons in the British coastal artillery armoury.
  For years, Levant Battery was an excluded area, where unauthorised entry by the public was considered a criminal offence. While Breakneck Battery is still closed to the public, the other four batteries are now accessible. In the 1970s, Levant Battery was decommissioned. Later, the 9.2-inch gun was removed. In 1981, the gun at Spur Battery was dismantled and transferred to the Imperial War Museum Duxford in Cambridgeshire, England in the military operation referred to as Project Vitello. In 2010, O'Hara's Battery and Lord Airey's Battery were opened to the public.
  In February 2011, a group, later renamed "Save the Levant Battery 9.2 Gun," was founded to increase awareness of the battery's gun and to garner support for its recovery and restoration to either its original site or Harding's Battery, which was exposed and restored in 2010-2011 during the refurbishment of Europa Point. The 9.2-inch gun from Levant Battery now rests in the Metalroc scrap yard on Devil's Tower Road.
caption: The gun and mount from the Levant Battery in Gibraltar is at Metalrok Limited in Gibraltar. The gun still has its Mark V mount and has been there for about forty years resting on its original trailer.
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