Photo: Kyrre·CC BY-SA 3.0· Wikimedia Commons
Redoubt from 1664
In 1664 General Rüsenstein raised a timber redoubt on Festningsholmen by Akerøya to bar the approach to Fredrikstad. The fort held up to 27 guns, was never taken in battle, and was in the end demolished by its own side.
The island was called Saltholmen in the saga age, after the shallow pools where people boiled sea salt, and Bronze Age people buried their dead in cairns by the highest point, 33 metres above the sea. The fortress story begins in 1664, when General Rüsenstein raised a small timber redoubt on Festningsholmen to bar the approach to Fredrikstad against Swedish warships and privateers in the Skagerrak.
Around 1680 General Johan Caspar de Cicignon rebuilt the redoubt in stone, the same man who laid out the street grid of Kristiansand and built Fredrikstad fortress. At its height the fort held 27 guns and up to 150 soldiers in wartime. Peacetime was another matter: in 1801, 19 men sat there.
The fort was never taken in battle, and no Swedish gun was ever fired at it. What felled it was the loss of the fleet: after Denmark-Norway lost its navy in 1807, the fort stood without ships to lean on and without secure supply lines, and Prince Christian August ordered it demolished in 1808.
It lay in ruins for more than a century and a half, until a restoration committee set to work in 1962. Through the 1960s most of the masonry was raised anew with state funds and voluntary labour, before the work stopped in 1999 when the money ran out. Around the ruins, island life carried on: cattle grazed here until about 1950, and the author Johan Borgen kept a home on the island. When Ytre Hvaler national park was established in 2009, Akerøya became part of it.
Access, protection and live departures stand on the island page: Akerøy.
Every fact in this piece is drawn from the island dossier behind the island page, and these are its sources.