The Halifax Citadel

Four forts have stood on this hill, and the hill itself is now ten to twelve metres shorter than it was.

Citadel Hill was first fortified in 1749, the year Edward Cornwallis oversaw the founding of Halifax. Successive rebuilds followed, each meant to defend the town from whoever was threatening it at the time, and the construction and levelling involved has lowered the summit by that ten to twelve metres.

The naming is a small tangle worth getting right. All four fortifications have been referred to as Fort George, but only the third, built between 1794 and 1800, was officially given that name, by General Orders of 20 October 1798, after King George III. The first two and the fourth, which is the one standing, were officially called the Halifax Citadel. The current fort is a concrete star fort.

It was never attacked. That is not a failure but the point: the Citadel was for a very long time the keystone of the defence of Halifax Harbour and its Royal Navy Dockyard, and a fortification that deters is a fortification that worked.

Parks Canada runs it now as the Halifax Citadel National Historic Site of Canada, restored to how it looked when built in the Victorian era.

Inside it, the Army Museum Halifax Citadel has been open since 1953, housed in the working fortress itself. It tells the story of the soldiers of Nova Scotia across more than a century of conflict, from munitions to medals, on the battlefield and off. That combination is what makes the visit: you walk a restored Victorian fort and then read what the people who garrisoned this province actually did, in the building where they did it.