One Tree Hill, Honor Oak

[3] One Tree Hill was once a part of a much larger landscape called the Great North Wood.

The hill's Oak of Honor once marked the southern boundary of the Norman Honour of Gloucester.

[4] Before the end of the eighteenth century, the East India Company built a semaphore station on the top of the hill to signal when ships were sighted in the Channel, and it was used as a beacon point by the Admiralty during the Napoleonic Wars.

[3] In 1896 the hill was fenced off by a local golf club, but this led to large scale protests, occupation and removal of the fences by local members of the Selborne Society and Society for the Protection of Birds (later the RSPB).

The site has many ancient trees, but the main ones are hybrid black-poplar and London plane, the result of former landscaping.