 Hi, thank you for joining me, I'm in the Surrey Countryside today, going from beside the River Mol. The town of Cobham is about a mile, a mile and a half in that direction. I'm heading in this direction here, I've got to go across the M25. We're going to have a look at the Semaphore town. When I say Semaphore, probably most of anything to do with Semaphore in my videos has been Semaphore Signals that you get on railways. That's not what we're doing in today's video. We're going to look at a much earlier form of Semaphore, a communication tower, which was for communicating between London and Portsmouth. There's a whole line of these towers and we're going to go and see the only one that survives. I've come out the fields and away from the River Mol, I'm on a road called Pointer's Road. Getting close to the tower you may just be able to see the motorway. It's 29 degrees today but it's very windy out in that field. Down there you pretty can't see it. There is just some water there. It must be a tributary to River Mol. There's something quite interesting here. It looks like a rather elaborate letterbox post. It is actually the gates to the lodge, which I'm assuming was probably the original entrance to Hatchford Park, which has now been cut by the M25. I'm going to do a separate video. It's my plan for the Hatchford Park because there's something quite interesting. There's an old mausoleum but that's not going to be in this video. You have to like. Is this the world's tallest letterbox? Even if it is a letterbox set in an existing pillar, I think I might have just found the tallest letterbox in Great Britain. If you know of a taller letterbox, please do comment and tell me. Let's go from the tallest letterbox to the tall tower. I've now turned off Pointer's Road and gone up the drive towards the tower. It's where we cross the M25. You can probably hear the traffic. Interesting that there's a concrete block. It's got steps. I think that's for horse riders to dismount their horses. So, you obviously don't want you riding a horse over the M25. I'm not sure if there's any reason why they don't want you to ride a horse over the M25. Anyway, here is the M25. So, that way is clockwise. Just up there in the distance, see the junction with the M3. That's probably not M3, the A3. And then looking anticlockwise, a little bit busy. I hope it's not as busy when I want to go home. If it is, I may have to find a different route. Anyway, into the woods and let's find this tower. So, after a pleasant walk through the woods, we're almost at the tower. So, the tower we're going to see, this Semaphore Tower, it's a very interesting survival from the Napoleonic era. It was built following the Battle of Waterloo. They built a string of towers all the way from Admiral House in London, right down to Portsmouth, and they could use it for communicating. And they did, they communicated from 1882 to 1847, but it was never actually used in any form of wartime technology moved on. Before this tower, they would have lit beacons on the hills, but after lighting the beacons on the hills, the next stage of technology was this. This is the Champlain Heave Semaphore Tower. And up on the top is the Semaphore, which can spell out different letters and different numbers as we're going to find out when we go inside. After it finished its use as a tower, it at one point became an estate house. Somebody lived here in the grounds of the estate that we're in. And then eventually it became derelict. Unfortunately, it caught fire and not much happened. And then in 1989, I believe, they began to restore the tower. And then finally in around 2020, the Landmark Trust took on the tower, restored it, and you can now go and stay there, but they occasionally have open days. So you can hide it. If you have a group of four people and you want to go on holiday somewhere, you can stay here, but here. Today, no one's staying there, because we are going to be going into people's bedrooms and stuff. There won't be anyone to sleep. It's open today to go and have a look around. So we're going to go inside, and I suspect we're going to go right up onto the roof. It's going to be really quite good fun. So let's go and explore the interior of the Semaphore Tower. And here we are inside. We're in one of the bedrooms on the second or first floor, depending on whichever way you look at it. Nice big bed. So it's a Landmark Trust property. You can stay here. So you can hide this out and two of you can sleep up here. There's a couple more bedrooms up there. So we're going to have a look around. Now we're going to go right up to the roof. It's really quite exciting. So this is the staircase. That one's coming down. It goes right up to the top. So go up here. So it has the feeling of being a house. So like I said, you can hide this, come and stay here for the weekend. It'd be quite a pleasant place to stay. So here's the other. Let's see what's in here. Now this is the shower room here. So put the door slams shut. The shower, basin, toilet. No need for frosted glass because there's no one's climbing a tree and no one's going to see you. Back into the hallway so basically. Because of the size, it's just a room per floor. But that's what's part of its charm. So this is two beds here. So it sleeps four people. We're going to continue up. See what other rooms. We're going to expect to find a, maybe a lounge and a kitchen. There was also like a little reception area and a big bathroom downstairs on the ground floor. So we continue up here. You know, if you stay here, it'd be quite nice to just go out for walks out into the woods. Landmark troughs have lots of properties all over the UK. And I think even into Europe. So maybe one day we can go and visit some other properties there. This is the lounge. So I imagine it'd be great to stay here. Sit down here for an evening. No TV, but you know, you don't need a TV. Sit and play a game and chat. Maybe have a drink. Very nice place to come on holiday to. It's quite near to where I live. So wherever I'd come here on holiday, but certainly some of the other places, I may well go to on holiday. Lots of appropriate books of the area. There's even a Swallows and Amazons book there because they did semaphore signaling, which we'll talk about quite soon. When we get to the top, go up another flight of stairs. To view out the window into the trees. By the time we get to the top, hopefully we should be above all the trees. So we continue up to here. Now this staircase, which we've been going up, kind of breaks, here becomes a separate staircase up to the roof. So you can see down there, right the way down, where we've just been. So we've been coming up quite a long way. This room here is the kitchen. That's the landmark across the sky there, which has some of the properties. This is the workings for the semaphore, which we'll have a look at when we get up there. So it's a really nice kitchen. We will continue on up the final set of stairs onto the roof. I've been most excited about it because I always enjoy climbing up the towers. This is mind your head, so be careful. And here we are, we're on the roof of the semaphore tower. And it's really quite... Come up here, there's just people casually sat there at a picnic table and then looking out. That way it's looking towards... The camera won't pick it up. Obviously up towards London, I can see where I'm going to be at. We started down there, somewhere down there, in the Marl Valley. As you can see, we're right up the trees. The chestnut trees look nice, you don't often get to see them on top like this. There's still a lot of chimneys there. If we go over here, we'll have a look at the view on this side. So that way looks out onto the southern country side. And then, of course, the most important thing really up here is the semaphore. And if you were to look at it from this side, it doesn't actually... I looked and the position it's in, there is nothing that could be in that position. So I'm going to make my way back down to our walk, somehow through the trees and then back to where I parked my car over there somewhere. I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you very much for watching. Do look out for Future Landmark Trust Open Days at both this property and other properties. They do have them, and also, as I said, you can come and stay in them. So thank you very much for watching. Please do feel free to like, subscribe, and comment. And from the view, from the Chantney Heave Semaphore Tower, goodbye.