Time Ball Tower

The Time Ball tower sits on a hill at the beach end of Semaphore Road, overlooking Semaphore beach. It’s a gorgeous old tower and used to help ships keep their clocks on time.
It’s worth climbing up to the tower just to get a better view of the beach. It’s also had some lovely landscaping done around it, which makes it a great area to sit and relax, above the business of the foreshore.

It’s well worth stopping off to have a closer look at this tower if you’re in Semaphore.
The Time Ball Tower was the largest working carousel in the southern hemisphere, my Semaphore guide book states.
A plaque on the stone structure reveals it dates back to 1875 «to enable ships at anchorage and the inner harbor to rate their chronometers» — precise clocks that were used as portable time standards to allow ship navigators to determine longitude.
You can still see the black ball at the top of the tower, which was hoisted to the masthead at 12.57pm daily and dropped at 1pm by electronic release by Adelaide Observatory.
I note there is a locked door in the structure.