Over the weekend 4-5th June 2022 every village, town and city in the UK celebrated the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. There was an informal street party in our village and a larger event at the local town, which ended with lighting a beacon.
Signal beacons were used to send alarms in England from Anglo Saxon times, and probably earlier. They alerted the country to the Spanish Armada in 1588 and were still in use when Napoleon threatened invasion around 1800. They were superseded by the development in England of railways (1820s) and the electric telegraph (1830s). A similar system was in place between 1940 and 1943, when church bells could only be rung to announce a German invasion (or in some cases to warn of air raids).
