£50,000 grant helps light up Cornish skies for Platinum Jubilee

A BEACON will be lit at an Iron Age hill fort in Cornwall to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee – thanks to a grant of almost £50,000 from the National Lottery Community Fund.

Cornwall Heritage Trust is one of 93 organisations across the country to be awarded funding from the Platinum Jubilee Fund, which has been launched by the National Lottery to celebrate 70 years of the Queen’s reign.

The trust, which received £49,832, will use its grant to create and grow community engagement and volunteering opportunities across heritage sites, with a particular focus on Castle-an-Dinas, near St Columb Major, and Sancreed, near Penzance. It will be running school visits and workshops, as well as story cafés and outreach events at Castle-an-Dinas, a ditch and rampart fort from the second or third centuries BC.

The project officially launches on June 2, when the trust will join the national beacon lighting event to mark the Platinum Jubilee.

Beacons will be lit at Castle-anDinas and Sancreed Beacon at 9.45pm and the trust is hoping to be joined by the local communities as well as their members and friends at the events.

Cathy Woolcock, chief executive at Cornwall Heritage Trust, said: “We are delighted to have been awarded this funding to mark Her Majesty The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Our project will establish a volunteering scheme across the organisation which we hope will inspire people to engage with and care for Cornwall’s important heritage sites and the communities surrounding them.

“We would like to thank the National Lottery players for making this possible.”