SECURITY won't be a worry with this stunning property - a 160-year-old former fort built to defend the Isle of Wight from the threat of the French Navy.
The once-functional military building is now a beautiful home perched on a cliff with one of the UK's best coastal views.
Quirky Freshwater Redoubt still has its old ramparts, tunnels and gun emplacements, as well as a helicopter landing pad and its own beach which is only accessible by boat or at low tide.
The house, which can be an eight-bedroom home or divided up into several smaller properties, is now on the market with Biles and Co for £3million.
Known as Fort Redoubt, the building was created in 1855-56 to protect Freshwater Bay on the western end of the island, which was a possible landing beach for enemy troops to attack the Needles Battery.
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The cliff was, and still is, too steep to climb and the north and west sides were protected by a deep, dry, brick-walled moat, which is still visible.
It was one of many Palmerston forts built under Prime Minister Lord Palmerston during the Victorian period as a response to the threat of possible invasion by the French under Emperor Louis Napoleon.
But the threat evaporated when the French were defeated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the forts became largely obsolete.
They were the most costly and extensive system of fixed defences undertaken in Britain during peacetime.
In 1861 Queen Victoria and her four-year-old daughter Princess Beatrice, who lived in Osborne House in nearby East Cowes, visited Freshwater Redoubt, after they were invited by the wife of Colonel R. B. McCrea, Royal Artillery.
And it is rumoured that poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, who moved to Farringford House in Freshwater in 1853, was inspired by hearing guns test firing at the fort when he wrote his most famous poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854.
This fort was designed with an upper battery facing the sea and a lower battery that covered Freshwater Bay and a total of seven guns.
The upper battery became instructional for the School of Gunnery at nearby Golden Hill Fort. A gun exploded there in 1901, killing an officer and three men.
During the First World War it was manned against attacks from German raiding parties before being decommissioned in 1918 and sold by the army in 1928.
It was converted into a two-storey private residence in 1936 and was used by the owner as a summer retreat. It even had a swimming pool in the fort's water tank.
The Home Guard kept watch from the fort during the Second World War and it operated as a tea room from 1977 until the 1990s.
The Grade II listed house is currently divided with a 'Main house', which has a stunning triple-aspect living room and a large open split-level room called the Sea Lounge, and three bedrooms, an 'Upper Flat' which is an adjoining three-bedroom apartment and and a 'Lower Annexe' which has two bedrooms and its own front door.
It comes with three acres of grounds and includes a separate one-bedroom holiday cottage called Moonfleet, which was originally married quarters for the master gunner.
Peter White stayed at the fort in 2005 and wrote Moonfleet the opera, based on the novel Moonfleet about smuggling by J Meade Falkner.
There is also the Caponier - a two-storey 1850s building which served as barracks for 24 men with planning permission to be turned into two flats - and the Casemates, eight arched store rooms around the courtyard.
A spokesman for the estate agents Biles and Co said: "It's a spectacular coastal house commanding magnificent panoramic sea views and set within a Victorian fort, atop chalk cliffs overlooking Freshwater Bay.
"The location is truly spectacular and stands at the foot of Tennyson Down, in an area of outstanding natural beauty. It is on the Heritage Coast, at the centre of one of the island's most photographed and painted landscapes.
"The Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson lived nearby at Farringford and it has been suggested that the gun practice from the Fort helped him when writing his most famous poem – The Charge of the Light Brigade.
"The main building has evolved from the original Army officers quarters and the current owners have upgraded and restored the accommodation in the Main House and Upper Flat.
"The property provides a wonderful opportunity for a principal residence or a coastal second home with the other accommodation useable for staff or caretakers or for generating additional letting or holiday letting income."
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