Churchill's Picket, Chakdara: History and Access

Churchill's Picket at Chakdara is a small stone signal tower on the ridge above Chakdara Fort, where the road to Dir and Chitral crosses the Swat river in Lower Dir. It was built by the British in the mid-1890s to flash heliograph messages to the garrison at Malakand, and during the siege of 1897 the men inside it sent the two-word signal "Help us". Winston Churchill wrote the best-known account of that siege, which is how the tower got its name, but he was not here when it happened.

The fort is still in military use, so you look at the tower from the road and the bridge, not from inside. This guide covers what the tower was for, what happened in 1897, how solid the Churchill link is, and how to stop here on the way to Swat, Dir or Kumrat.

What is Churchill's Picket?

A picket, or piquet, is a small outlying guard post. This one was a signal station. Before radio, the army on the frontier talked between hilltops by heliograph, a mirror on a tripod that flashes sunlight in Morse code, and the tower at Chakdara was placed high enough to be seen from the Malakand Pass about eight miles away.

Churchill described the position in his 1898 book The Story of the Malakand Field Force. The fort sits on a rocky knoll about a hundred yards from the hillside. The signal tower was "a detached post 200 yards up the cliff" behind it. From that ridge, he noted, you could look and fire straight down into the fort, which made the tower both essential and exposed.

Pakistan's Army Institute of Military History describes the same building today: a watch tower that catches the eye on the road from Chakdara towards Timergara, named in Churchill's honour, which was in fact a heliograph station.

Why was a fort built at Chakdara?

Chakdara is where the route north to Dir and Chitral crosses the Swat. The Mughals built a fort here in 1586. After the Chitral expedition of 1895 the British threw a suspension bridge across the river, occupied the old site, and built the present fort in 1896 to guard the crossing.

Churchill called the bridge a narrow, swinging wire bridge nearly 500 yards long, closed at its southern end by an iron door with a stone tower on either side. Today's road bridge crosses at the same point.

The siege of 1897

On the evening of 26 July 1897 the fort's commander, Lieutenant H. B. Rattray, was playing polo at Khar, near Malakand, when a note arrived that a large body of tribesmen was marching on Chakdara. He rode back through them, sent one telegram to Malakand, and the wire was cut. The first attack came at about 10.30 that night.

The garrison was about 200 men: 180 rifles of the 45th Sikhs and 20 troopers of the 11th Bengal Lancers. Forty more lancers under Captain Wright fought their way in from Malakand the next morning. Against them were about 1,500 fighters on the first night and, by Churchill's figures, 12,000 to 14,000 a week later.

The tower's part in this is the reason it is remembered.

1. 27 July. Six men, food and water were sent up to reinforce the tower guard, covered by both Maxim guns. Water went up the same way each day after that.
2. 29 July. A direct assault on the tower failed. More than fifty bodies lay around it the next morning.
3. 1 August. The attackers took the ridge and the civil hospital beside the fort, cutting the tower off. It was very hot, and the men inside signalled again and again for water that could not be sent.
4. The message. A signaller, Sepoy Prem Singh, climbed out through an opening in the tower under fire to set up his heliograph. Rattray's report says the signalling was so dangerous that they sent only two words: "Help us."
5. 2 August. Cavalry of the Guides and the 11th Bengal Lancers came over the Amandara ridge that morning and the siege broke. The tower guard got water at 4.30 that afternoon, their first since Saturday morning.

Churchill's casualty table gives 20 for the garrison in seven days: 7 killed and 13 wounded. He put the attackers' loss at Chakdara at more than 2,000 killed and wounded, a figure from the British side that cannot be checked.

Did Churchill stay at the picket?

Almost certainly not during the fighting, and there is no record that he stayed in it afterwards. Churchill was a 22-year-old cavalry subaltern who talked his way onto Sir Bindon Blood's Malakand Field Force as a correspondent for The Pioneer and The Daily Telegraph. He reached the frontier about a month after Chakdara had been relieved, rode with the force on its later operations, and was back with his regiment in Bangalore by October 1897.

His chapter on Chakdara is written from Rattray's report and from walking the ground afterwards: "Looking at the ground," he wrote of the daily water run to the tower, "it seems wonderful that supplies could have been got through at all." The book made his name as a writer. The tower took his name later, as a local label, not because of anything he did in it.

Can you visit Churchill's Picket?

Only from outside. Chakdara Fort is a working paramilitary post, listed as a training centre of the Chitral Scouts, and neither the fort nor the tower above it is open to the public. There is no ticket office and no official visiting arrangement that we could find.

What you can do:

• See it from the bridge and the main road. The fort on its knoll and the tower on the ridge behind are both plain from the N-45 as it crosses the river.
• Keep the camera pointed sensibly. Photographing military posts is not allowed in Pakistan. A picture of the hill from the public road is one thing; a long lens trained on the gate is another. If a sentry waves you on, go.
• Do not try to climb the ridge. It is part of the post's ground.
• Allow fifteen minutes, then go to the museum.

The Dir Museum, a few minutes away in the town, is the part of Chakdara you can walk around. It holds Gandharan sculpture from the Buddhist sites around the town. Damkot hill, above the river, where a stupa and monastery were excavated between 1962 and 1965, is one of several close by.

Getting to Chakdara

From Islamabad or Peshawar the quick way is the M-1 and then the Swat Motorway, which has an interchange at Chakdara. It is about 195 km from Islamabad and about 130 km from Peshawar; allow about three hours from Islamabad without long stops. From Mingora in Swat it is about 43 km, and from Timergara about 40 km.

The town is the fork where the Swat road and the Dir road part, so it fits naturally into the drives covered in our Peshawar to Kumrat and Swat to Kumrat guides. Road transport between Peshawar and Timergara passes through the town.

Is Chakdara safe to visit?

Check before you go. The UK government's travel advice, updated on 22 September 2026, advises against all travel to Lower Dir and to the N-45 between Mardan and Chitral, both of which cover Chakdara, and against all travel to Swat. In 2026 three policemen were killed at Laram Top in Lower Dir on 16 July, and a suicide bombing at Kabal police station in Swat on 2 August killed 17.

Pakistani travellers pass through Chakdara every day on the way to Swat and Kumrat. Read local news and current police advice before you set out, travel in daylight, and keep the stop short. Foreign-passport holders should read their own government's advice first, since travelling against it can void insurance.

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