Lion Battery

This guide to Lion Battery on Cape Town's Signal Hill follows the Noon Gun ritual still run six days a week by South African Navy gunners, using an eighteen-pounder cannon cast in London in 1794, one of the oldest guns in daily use anywhere in the world. It traces how the gun once helped ships in Table Bay set their marine chronometers, its move up to Signal Hill in 1902, and the atomic-clock signal that now sparks the charge each day. Stand here at eleven forty five and watch the crew load two tons of iron before the boom.