in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the north-east corner becoming a popular site for picnics. Writing in 1785, the antiquarian Francis Grose attributed the decline of the fortification to the changes in the local harbours and the superiority of the British Navy in protecting the coasts, observing that the castle's architecture "clearly shew the low state of military architecture" during the 16th century in England. In response to the threat posed by France during the Napoleonic Wars, Lieutenant Colonel John Brown surveyed the castle in 1804 to examine whether the central keep could be turned into a Martello tower, a type of circular gun tower popular during this period. The scheme was not taken forward, although the defences of the surrounding coast line were much improved by the government. The painter J. M. W. Turner visited between 1805 and 1807 during the middle of this work, later depicting the castle in landscape paintings and sketches of the area. 20th – 21st centuries At the start of the 20th century Camber Castle and the surrounding farmland remained in private ownership and open to visitors. In 1931 there was a proposal to turn the keep into a golf clubhouse but the project was not taken forward and the facility was built at the nearby Castle Farm instead. A research team from the Victoria County History project visited the castle in 1935, resulting in the first – albeit cursory – historical analysis and survey of the fortification being published two years later. By the 1940s, the castle structures were mostly covered with rubble and debris, interwoven with pathways created by the movement of visitors over the years. During the Second World War, the castle was used by the British Army, possibly as an early warning site fitted with anti-aircraft searchlights. In an area just to the north of the castle, the Starfish and Naval decoy sites were created to distract incoming German bombers from the town of Rye itself. Trenches were dug in the north bastion, and military training may have been conducted around the outskirts of the castle. In the post-war years, archaeological interest in the castle grew. From 1951 onwards the Ministry of Works carried out a long-running research project into the Device Forts, the section on Camber being written by the historian Martin Biddle and finally published in 1982. Biddle carried out an exploratory archaeological survey of the site