St Catherine’s Island zoo near Tenby closed permanently after primates escaped the Napoleonic fortress and caused chaos on the local beach
A strange zoo on a fortified island, accessible only during low tide, housed 100 animals, including a troop of mischievous monkeys and the ghosts of its former military occupants.
Christopher and Marion Batt discovered the Napoleonic fortress on St Catherine’s Island, off the Tenby coastline, and set their sights on transforming it into an animal sanctuary.
Arriving in Pembrokeshire in 1968, they brought with them a collection of exotic creatures in toe, with their baby daughter expected to follow shortly afterwards.
Their daughter Ginny was born, and the family shared the island with otters, badgers, an alligator, and mice.
The monkeys would frequently break free, scaling down the cliff face to wreak havoc on the local beach. One particularly bold monkey even snatched a man’s false teeth straight from his mouth, according to Wales Online, reports Wales Online.
Andi Jones, who now manages the island in its current guise as a wildlife sanctuary, recalled: “They’d go after anyone’s hats, scarves, handbags, they would pile them up, sit in a little circle on the sand and play with what they had stolen.
“The local guys realised that if you clapped your hands and shouted, the monkeys would leave what they had stolen and run back to their cages in the fort.
“They were very territorial, they wouldn’t escape, insofar as they wouldn’t go any further, because they knew where their safe shelter was.”
By 1979, the Batts were forced to abandon the zoo after relentless salt spray battered the animals and the cost of transporting supplies to the island became financially unviable. The zoo had fallen into serious disrepair, and visitors’ recollections of it were grim. The Batt’s daughter Ginny also recalled some unsettling incidents connected to the island’s past.
Ginny remains convinced the fort is haunted. “There was always noises here,” she said.
“It was always the sound of soldiers marching up and down singing. It was quite eerie. Or there was unexplained things which used to happen. Animals would mysteriously get loose or the fire would fall over and set fire to something.
“They were completely unexplained and there is definitely something here.”
The island formed part of a network of coastal defences built across Britain during the Napoleonic Wars in 1870. It wasn’t until 1886 that it became fully armed, with six massive guns positioned in the gun deck within the fort, and three additional guns mounted on the roof battery.
After serving once more as a defensive installation during the Second World War, the fort was acquired by wealthy Tenby businessman Graham Fry in 1962. He continues to own it to this day.
The Batts kept its animals in enclosures built within the fort’s chambers and across the flat rooftop. The enclosures were basic wooden structures covered with heavy gauge wire netting, suitably furnished with perches, shelves and shelters, meeting the acceptable standards of that era.
The more delicate and diminutive species were kept in indoor facilities, including a tree shrew, a pair of night monkeys and a breeding group of common marmosets, a pair of ververt monkeys, blotched genets, stump-tailed macaques, bushbabies, striped skunks and a single lesser indian mongoose.
Spanning the principal roof area were pairs of African civets and coatis, a trio of red foxes and some ferrets, positioned next to aviaries housing the larger bird inhabitants. Within the former gunpowder storage rooms, there was a nocturnal display area and there used to be an alligator exhibit.
Annual visitor numbers to the zoo reached approximately 45,000.
Nowadays it operates as a seasonal heritage site and historic military stronghold. It can be reached by foot from Castle Beach when the tide is out. Guests can discover the maintained military defences, observe traces of the 1970s zoo period, and take in seaside vistas.
