Placeholder while loading article actions
LONDON – To celebrate the platinum jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, commemorating her 70th year on the throne, her subjects set fire to the British Isles, in a good way.
On Thursday night, just after dark, an estimated 3,500 beacons were lit, reimagining and reusing the torch relays deployed once in England to warn of a possible invasion, from the Viking prowling in 793 or the Spanish Navy. in 1588 or Napoleon in 1803.
To celebrate the platinum jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, marking her 70th birthday on the throne, more than 3,200 beacons will be lit in the British Isles. (Video: The Washington Post)
From 9:45 pm on the farm fields and royal estates, on top of the castle walls and town halls, the beacon fires burned in a ceremony that took advantage of the old ways.
If Henry VIII had heard of the burning of his chain of beacons, he would have gathered his armies to the coast to face the French in battle.
Before? Beacons indicated an extreme emergency.
Now? It’s a mega-celebration.
Platinum Jubilee: One Last Party for Queen Elizabeth II and the Party the British Need
Thursday’s jubilee festivities also included an elaborate military parade of Trooping the Color in London, watched by the Queen from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. The palace later said it had experienced “some discomfort” and would retire from a Thanksgiving church service on Friday. But he still took part in a beacon lighting ceremony at Windsor Castle, now his main residence, on Thursday night.
Many of the thousands of beacons were old-fashioned bonfires, some huge, some humble. Others fed on medieval-style braziers or gas burners erected on tall poles.
Some were artistic: emitting less carbon dioxide, according to a green agenda. At a Manchester hospital, welders created a lighthouse sculpture that resembled a giant crown, made of old hospital beds, lit by blue lasers.
The old school fire, created by the Yeoman Warders, lit the battlements of the Tower of London. The flames could be seen in the night sky on the Queen’s Sandringham and Balmoral estates in Norfolk and Scotland, and also at Windsor Castle.
Festivities lit the lighthouses in a Hindu temple in London, Winston Churchill’s birthplace in Blenheim Palace and the 17th-century Tan Hill Inn in Yorkshire Dales, Britain’s highest-grossing pub.
Organizers expected the flames to be visible on the four highest peaks in the UK as climbers with gas embers climbed to the top of Ben Nevis in Scotland, Scafell Pike in England, Mount Snowdon in Wales and Slieve Donard in Ireland. of the North.
Memories of the platinum jubilee, from cups to Barbies to corgi cakes
The Platinum Jubilee is also celebrated in the capitals of the 53 Commonwealth nations, which lit their own fires, although some of these nations have less and less to do with the Queen and Britain.
Jubilee Lighthouse Contest Master Bruno Peek told The Washington Post before the ceremony: “It will be a wonderful, unprecedented and international show.”
Peek said the ritual was appropriate: “The queen has been our beacon, infallible in her service, and for that we want to show our gratitude.”
There were 51 points of light along the wall of Hadrian, the 73 miles of defensive structures extending from east to west through England, built 1,900 years ago by order of the Roman emperor.
“There’s nothing like a massive bonfire to get people out,” said Jez Light, the master builder of the Hadrian’s Wall. “Fire is elementary: it speaks to people.”
Queen Elizabeth II: A visual chronology of her 70 years on the throne
He was directing the show at Cawfields, a Victorian quarry dug into Hadrian’s Wall, where three archers dressed as Roman soldiers fired flaming arrows at a giant pile of firewood floating in a pond on the quarry lake.
“This will be the last jubilee of the Queen’s reign and this is a message of gratitude,” he said.
In 1897, beacons were lit to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In 1977, 2002 and 2012, the beacons commemorated the silver, gold and diamond jubilees of Queen Elizabeth II.
Stuart Brookes, a professor of medieval archeology at University College London, said fire beacons were deployed for centuries in England, no doubt by the Anglo-Saxons in the ninth century to warn the population of continued Viking invasions.
“It was a fairly sophisticated communications system in the late Middle Ages,” he said, describing the basic message as “run to the hills or gather your armies.”
The lighting of the beacons makes it a particularly dramatic scene in “The Lord of the Rings”.
The corgis play a leading role in the celebrations of the platinum jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II
Archaeological evidence of the first beacons is scarce. The first signs of fire may have been drawn to some of the same peaks that Bronze Age people had sought for their religious sites and settlements.
But place names also tell the story, Brookes said, as “Beacon Hill.”
A famous street in London is called Tottenham Court Road. In Old English, “Tottenham” means “lighthouse house”.
These things go back a long way, the archaeologist said.