![]() Our accommodations for this botanical tour will be two award-winning Canopy Family properties: our flagship ecolodge, the Canopy Tower, atop 900-ft. Tour highlights include a trip to the cloud forests of Cerro Jefe and Altos del Maria, where tree trunks are festooned with an amazing diversity of epiphytic plants, including aroids, ericoids, bromeliads and orchids! ( See this pdf of orchids seen in October 2019). © Malcolm Bacchus, Telegraph Hill Society 2004.In this special botanical tour, we will find and identify gesners, campanulas, acanths, melastomes, gingers, begonias and other awesome native plants, but our emphasis will be hunting for some of Panama’s amazing orchids, whose diversity is astounding-some 1200 species strong! We should find 40 or more blooming species, from tiny super-miniatures, such as Platystele and Specklinia, to possibly, if lucky, large species of Sobralia, as October is one of the peak months for seeing orchids in central Panama. The Society publishes a number of histories of the area. This page created by The Telegraph Hill Society: the amenity society for residents on the hill. That too has almost gone - leaving only the name of Telegraph Hill as a reminder of the early days of automated communications. That demise came as the railways came to New Cross Gate and, with the railways, faster and more secure means of communications rapidly followed. It is a strange coincidence that the first examples of railway semaphore signalling were also tried out at New Cross only a few years later. A new single mast telegraph was tried out in 1816, and a system with rotating pointers tried in 1824 finally reverting to the six shutter type until its demise in 1836. The telegraph's high point came with the signalling of Wellington's victory at Waterloo and with Nelson's defeat of Bonaparte at Trafalgar and the surrender of the French forces, the telegraph's days of glory were almost over. The views to the south and east - down the telegraph chain - have been obscured by Victorian development although it is said that before South London was built up Knockholt and Sevenoaks could be seen on a fine day. St Paul's and the Palace of Westminster are easily viewable. The picture on the left shows the view from the site, with Hampstead Heights and Alexandra Palace on the horizon. Why this location for the telegraph? You only need to go there today to see that it commands impressive views over Central London. The messages went from there to St George's in the Fields, then Telegraph Hill, then Shooter's Hill and on to Deal and Dover.Ī second route, established later, went down to Portsmouth via One Tree Hill. The Telegraph Hill semaphore station (pictured above right,from any early engraving) was established in 1795 and was the third in Each building in the chain could be observed from the next in line and, by this means, a message passed along the chain. ![]() The shutters were opened and closed by means of levers and each of the 63 different open or closed shutter combinations signified a different letter or word. The Semaphore Telegraph system involved a chain of buildings each on a prominent hill-toand each bearing a series of eight shutters on their roofs. Moored on the South Coast than could be achieved by rider on horseback. War with France and the Admiralty needed a faster means tocommunicate to its fleet To the north were field and to the south, the remnants of the Great In 1794 our hill was known as Plow'd Garlic Hill as it had been since the middleĪges - most possibly a reference to the marketing gardening which took place here. ![]() Published by the Telegraph Hill Society as Historial Note No 4. ![]() A longer history of the telegraph, with details of how it worked, is This is a short summary of how Telegraph Hill got its name and what the telegraphĭid.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |