[3] Lord Macaulay included the Beacon in his poem Armada, which describes the chain of warning fires which were lit when the Spanish Armada attempted to invade England in 1588:[4] And on, and on, without a pause, untired they bounded still All night from tower to tower they sprang; they sprang from hill to hill Till the proud Peak unfurled the flag o’er Darwin's rocky dales Till like volcanoes flared to heaven the stormy hills of Wales, Till twelve fair counties saw the blaze on Malvern's lonely height,

It can also be accessed by a short, steep, unpathed climb from Jubilee Drive on the western side, or reached by a more leisurely stroll along the crest of the ridge from a car park near the Wyche Cutting, a mile or so to the south of the town centre.

The hills are mostly igneous and metamorphic rocks from the late pre-Cambrian, around 600 million years old and the Beacon is part of the watershed that permits the rise of the mineral springs and wells of the famous Malvern water that is bottled commercially on a large scale and sold worldwide, and they were responsible for the development of Malvern from a village to a busy spa town in the early 19th century.

Hundreds of millions of years of erosion and glacial passage have given the Beacon and its neighbouring peaks their characteristic smoothly rounded features.

In 1849 two urns containing bones and ashes were uncovered by Private Harkiss whilst conducting work for the Ordnance Survey and documented by Edwin Lees, a local antiquarian.

On the summit is a viewfinder or toposcope, identifying the hills to be seen on a clear day; it was designed by Malvern architect Arthur Troyte Griffith, a friend of Sir Edward Elgar and erected in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee.

[15] During World War II the Beacon was used as a fire lookout point for air raids on Birmingham and Coventry,[16] and in the latter half of the 20th century it was used regularly as a location for a BBC transmitter relay van for covering horse racing and sports events in Worcester.