Brown Willy is said to be one of "the UK's best-loved high points". The hill features in an annual race held on New Year's Day that starts and finishes at Jamaica Inn, an old coaching inn made famous by Daphne du Maurier's 1936 novel of the same name. The hill is regarded as a sacred mountain by members of the Aetherius Society, a UFO religion founded in 1954 by George King. They believe that Brown Willy was charged with "holy energy" on 23 November, which they celebrate each year as "Charging Day", and gather at the hill on that day each year
Jamaica Inn 1845, was building a chapel at Bolventor to accommodate those who lived in the Jamaica Inn area. In 1865, Murray wrote that the inn was frequented in the winter by sportsmen and offered only rudimentary accommodations. The current building still includes the extension of a coach house, stables and a tack room added in 1778. The inn was owned for a period by the novelist Alistair MacLean. The Jamaica Inn's past notoriety as the pirates' den was known to Du Maurier three years before she wrote her book, when she had lived in the inn, and on the basis of