109 
1883.] portions of Old Fort William. 
excavated before the demolition of the walls themselves was begun, as 
it may be imagined there was very little of the old walls left, for the 
corners of the new building, made up as they are of a main staircase, bath¬ 
rooms and urinals, implies a network of cross walls in the new work. In 
every case the old walls go down some two feet below the new walls, and in 
some cases (the north face wall for example) have a slice cut off their inner 
face from nil at one end to one or two feet at the other, and so we cut and 
sliced them to make way for our foundations. About this time we found the 
walls of a staircase or ramp in the junction of the north curtain wall and the 
old square bastion of the earlier construction, There was another, a stair, 
at the corresponding corner at the south-east bastion ; for Holwell tells us 
at the time the prisoners were in the verandah near the Governor’s House: 
“ Besides the guard over us, another was placed at the foot of the stairs at 
the south end of this verandah leading up to the south-east bastion to pre¬ 
vent any of us escaping that way.” 
As I have already said, the fort walls were founded at a lower level 
than the walls of the new building by 2 feet, so that below our foundations } 
would still be found a map as it were of the old Fort. 
I now found that the outer bastion with its flanking faces and salient 
was a later work, as the junctions of the flank walls with the older curtains 
butted and did not bond, in addition the old plaster surface had not been 
taken off but the new work was built against it. I afterwards found this 
to be the case with the north-west bastion, which, as will be seen, had not 
a square bastion similar to the north-east corner. 
The walls were battered with a fall in of about one in ten, and the outer 
faces were finished with a thin coat of lime plaster of a rich crimson tint, 
and reticulated in imitation of stone work, the stones being about 1'6 long 
by about 9 to 10 in. deep. This was the case with both the bastions. 
It struck me, as I exposed this deep red plaster, that probably this 
factory bastion would be called the Ball Killa (Red Fort), and it suggested 
itself to me that the Ball Diggee (Red Tank) may have taken its name from 
the Red Fort. 
All this work of the bastions, more particularly the later portion, was 
of very good material and excessively hard to break into. The bricks of 
all their old works were x 4 x 1^. The lime used here was shell lime. 
We often found large oyster shells, of a size that would weigh a seer to a 
seer and a half, embedded in the wall, and by the hundreds strewn about 
and buried in the fillings. 
The spaces between the older walls of the bastion were loose earth 
filling and no floor, the spaces behind the new bastion faces and flanks 
were paved brick on edge. The level of this paving and the bottom edge 
of the external plaster was 98 00, or 3-6 below my datum line, 5'0 below 
