Mount Batten

The earliest recorded name we have for this peninsula is Hostert or Hawe Stert or some similar version of these two old words, and this we can fairly confidently take to mean 'end of the hoe' - that is the end of a high place or ridge (cf Hoe on the other side of the water and Hooe).

During the Civil War however this spot was used as a defensive post by Plymouth's Parliamentarian forces and it was out of those troubled times that its new name arose, for after the new tower was built here in the 1660s (at the same time as the Citadel was constructed) Parliament appointed Captain, later Admiral Batten, as its first Governor.

So it became "Batten's" Tower and thereafter it was quite logical that in time this area, the tower and the hill on which it stood (which was then otherwise uninhabited and un-quarried) should become known as Mount Batten.

EH 04 September 1993