The Fort had a substantial renovation in 2008, which of course included a new sign. You’d think they might have gone for a picture of the Fort St George (in India), from which the place derives its name, wouldn’t you? But no, that would be too obvious (or require too much research). Instead we are treated to this rather dull image of some curtain walls with a generous sprinkling of mural towers:
Now maybe it’s because of all those Westerns I used to watch as a kid, but that’s not the image my mind conjures up when I hear the word ‘fort’: these are clearly defensive walls of a city or a substantial castle. At first I used to think that it wasn’t based on anything in the real world (and did rather wonder what the sign-painter had been drinking), but then I found a photograph of the walls of Ávila looked strikingly familiar. That’ll be the Ávila in Castilla y Leon, then. In Spain. Not England. Not India. Spain. And so far as I know, it has no connection with St George, either.
Well done, Greene King!
For the record, the sign it replaced looked like this:
The arms and supporters are clearly fanciful (forts cannot be armigerous entities), and the motto is that of a family by the name of St George (who appear to be Irish, so far as I can discover), presumably found in a book or on the internet. It was quite nice, though.
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