The Rill Point Cairn, CORNWALL

In the first chapter of my book The Quest for El Dorado I stand on an ancient cairn at Rill Point on the Lizard Peninsula, looking over the sea to the south-west where Sir Walter Ralegh sailed within sight on his Guiana expeditions in 1595 and 1617-18. On the Van Keulen map of about 1685 that forms the banner on this page you can see it at ‘Smith Point’ about a mile north-west of Lizard point, the southernmost extremity of mainland Britain. I’ve been to Rill Point many times while I’ve been based in Cornwall writing books and investigating wrecks, including the Rill Cove wreck immediately below the point - a site that also features in The Quest for El Dorado because it dates to the time of Ralegh’s second expedition, and contained many types of artefact that would have been familiar to Ralegh and his men.

The photo below shows the collapsed cairn looking south with Lizard village in the background and the 60-metre cliffs of Rill Point just a few metres away. The stones were described in A week at the Lizard (1879) by the Reverend Charles Johns, who noted that ‘the lower ones are fixed in the ground in the form of a circle’ and were perhaps the remains of a fire-beacon. The cairn is located at the highest point in the southern Lizard, higher than the base of the present-day lighthouse at Lizard Point, and it seems reasonable to think that this was the site of the first beacon lit to warn of the Spanish Armada in 1588 - known to have been on the Lizard Peninsula - and that it may also have been the site of an early 17th century lighthouse built by Sir John Killigrew, a local landowner with an interest in shipwrecks. Today you can still see the kerb of the structure - about 11 metres across - and imagine that the rubble might once have formed a circular building. It may be the site of a prehistoric barrow and some of the stones may have been reused from that structure. Standing here, you can imagine almost the entire history of British seafaring going by - Bronze Age boats carrying tin and copper, ships of exploration such as Ralegh’s, and traders, warships and passenger ships over the centuries, many of them leaving their mark in the shipwrecks to be found off this dangerous coast.