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 which she had spun her popular novel "Jamaica Inn", which was adapted into a melodramatic film of the same name made by Alfred Hitchcock. Before living in the inn, she had resided in Fowey estuary, a house in Bodinnick and subsequently in Menabilly. She described the nocturnal activities of a smuggling ring based at the now celebrated inn, "portraying a hidden world as a place of tense excitement and claustrophobia of real peril and thrill." It should be noted though that in Du Maurier's novel, the Jamaica Inn is not functioning as an inn with many guests as it did