To begin with, yesterday's picture showed a malformed lemon which Christine found hanging on my lemon tree. When I looked at it I said it looks like an alien and decided to take a shot of it.
Today's shot was taken a couple of weeks ago when , bored with the usual routes, I decided to take a different one from Għargħur which led to Naxxar. I did not know something like this tower ever existed.
The tower was built in 1848 by the British army, as one of a series of semaphore towers that worked like a chain to convey information across the island by using three manually-operated large blades mounted on a pole.
Invented by the French, the semaphore system came to Malta in the mid 1840s when poles were first installed on church steeples and domes. Eventually the church objected to this military use and semaphore stations were built.
The system was eventually replaced by the electronic telegraph.
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