Hensbarrow Beacon

Overlooking the industrial heart of the St Austell Downs, this summit provides a unique vantage point where ancient archaeology meets massive modern engineering. While the natural high point features a Bronze Age cairn and trig pillar, it is famously overshadowed by the towering, white 'Sky Tips' of the surrounding china clay works.

• •The name is a hybrid of the Cornish 'hen', meaning old, and the Old English 'beorg', denoting the Bronze Age burial mound that occupies the summit. This scheduled monument was later utilised as a fire beacon to signal across the county.
• •While the natural summit stands at 313 metres, it is no longer the highest point in the immediate landscape; nearby artificial spoil heaps of quartz sand, known locally as 'Sky Tips', rise to 355 metres.
• •During the medieval era, the hill served as the administrative centre for the Blackmoor Stannary, one of the four Cornish districts where tin miners met to settle legal disputes and record their production.
• •The panorama from the trig point stretches across the 'Cornish Alps' to the southern coastline at St Austell Bay, while the distant, jagged profiles of Rough Tor and Brown Willy are visible to the northeast on Bodmin Moor.
• •It is one of the few places in Britain where the official Marilyn status of a hill had to be transferred from the natural ground to the top of a man-made pile of mining waste.