Devonport

This guide to Devonport in Auckland traces the gun batteries built on the headland above town in the 1880s, out of a fear that Russian warships might sail into the harbor. It follows the one test shot fired in 1899, so loud it shattered windows across the neighborhood, and the decades of local rumor that tunnels beneath the hill hid warplanes during the Second World War. Listen for how much of the digging fell to convicts marched up from a nearby barracks, hauling picks and wheelbarrows through solid volcanic rock between 1888 and 1914.