Rat Island was bought in 1679 for the defence of Portsmouth Harbour on the Gosport side and remains Ministry of Defence land today. Buried within it are the foundations of Fort James, part of Gosport’s earliest fortifications at a time when much of the modern-day harbour’s western shoreline was tidal marshland. Built as part of the overall Portsmouth Harbour defences design by Sir Bernard de Gomme on the orders of Charles ll, it appears on a surviving 1711 map together with the larger Fort Charles (sited on land now occupied by the present-day Castle Tavern, by the former Camper & Nicholson boatyard) and Fort Blockhouse on the Gosport side of the harbour entrance.
Little more than a simple tower some 14 m square and 6 m high with a parapet wall and sentry boxes at each corner, its active use was short-lived. It was noted in 1707-8 by Admiral Sir George Byng that both Fort James and Fort Charles, “… in the condition they are now are of no use, the platforms of the upper works so decayed they will not bear the guns in the carriages, which are all to pieces…” By 1800 Fort James had become a ruin and the walls were taken down in 1827.
An 1847 letter refers to the burial of convicts on Burrow Island. Popular legend also has it that the bodies of prisoners of war who died on board the Portsmouth Harbour’s notorious prison “hulks” were left there for the resident population of Rattus rattus, the black or ships rat, to deal with.
Despite the discovery of human burials on the island’s shoreline following a storm in early 2014, the reality behind Burrow Island’s transition to Rat Island is almost certainly more mundane. It was a perfect place for ships to tie up while waiting to take on supplies at the new Royal Clarence victualling yard. Clearing the waste from the previous voyage out of the holds was a simply matter of throwing it over the ship’s side, onto the island. Meanwhile, as the yard itself grew rapidly in physical size and the scale of its operations, including a slaughterhouse on the water’s edge barely 100 metres opposite, Rat Island simply became an ideal rubbish tip for the by-products of feeding the fleet.