Cornwall Trivia
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50 free Cornwall trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Cornwall has its own language, its own saint, its own flag and its own pasty with legal protection. It is the southernmost county in the UK, the birthplace of the railway locomotive and, according to legend, of King Arthur. This Cornwall quiz covers Kernow's geography from the Tamar to Land's End, the tin and copper mines that became a World Heritage Site, the Eden Project and the Minack Theatre, Cornish food from stargazy pie to clotted cream, Poldark and Daphne du Maurier, and the customs of Padstow and Helston. Every answer is sourced and explained.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the Cornish-language name for Cornwall?
Kernow
Kernow. Like the Corn- of Cornwall, it goes back to a Celtic word for horn, presumably after the horn-like shape of the peninsula.
Q 02Which river forms most of the border between Cornwall and Devon?
Tamar
Tamar. It rises less than four miles from the north coast and flows to the south, so it almost cuts Cornwall off from the rest of Britain; King Athelstan set the border along it in 936.
Q 03What is Cornwall's only city?
Truro
Truro. It was made a city in 1877, the year after Cornwall regained a diocese of its own following centuries under the bishops of Exeter.
Q 04Which Christmas service was first held in 1880 in a wooden building serving as Cornwall's temporary cathedral?
Nine Lessons and Carols
Nine Lessons and Carols. Bishop Edward Benson devised it for Christmas Eve 1880, and King's College, Cambridge took it up in 1918 for the service now broadcast around the world.
Q 05Land's End is mainland England's westernmost point, but which Cornish headland is mainland Britain's southernmost?
Lizard Point
Lizard Point. England's first sight of the Spanish Armada came off this headland in July 1588, as the fleet entered the Channel.
Q 06Land's End sits on which peninsula at the western tip of Cornwall?
Penwith
Penwith. Land's End is England's most westerly mainland point but not Britain's: that lies on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the Scottish Highlands.
Q 07Which summit on Bodmin Moor is the highest point in Cornwall?
Brown Willy
Brown Willy. A 2012 campaign tried to swap the giggle-inducing name for its Cornish form, Bronn Wennili, but critics saw no need for a change and Brown Willy it remains.
Q 08Who is generally regarded as the patron saint of Cornwall?
Piran
Piran. The oratory linked to him at Perranporth was lost under drifting sand, dug out in 1835, buried again in 1980 to protect it and uncovered once more in 2014.
Q 09According to legend, how did Cornwall's patron saint arrive from Ireland?
Floating on a millstone
Floating on a millstone. In the tale his enemies in Ireland bound him to it and threw him off a cliff to drown, but the stone floated and carried him across the sea to Cornwall's north coast.
Q 10What does Cornwall's flag, the banner of its patron saint, look like?
A white cross on black
A white cross on black. The colours are said to show white tin flowing from black ore, though no record of the flag is known from before the 19th century.
Q 11Cornish belongs to which branch of the Celtic languages, alongside Welsh?
Brittonic
Brittonic. Cornish faded out as a community language by about 1800, but a 20th-century revival led UNESCO in 2010 to drop its 'extinct' label for 'critically endangered'.
Q 12Which living language is closer to Cornish than Welsh is?
Breton
Breton. Settlers, many of them from Cornwall, carried their speech across the Channel in the early Middle Ages, which is why Breton sits closer to Cornish than Welsh does.
Q 13In 2014 the UK government recognised the Cornish as what, under a European convention?
National minority
National minority. The decision gave the Cornish the same status under the Council of Europe convention as the UK's other Celtic peoples, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish.
Q 21Which tidal island is reached from Marazion on foot by a causeway uncovered at low tide?
St Michael's Mount
St Michael's Mount. When the tide covers the causeway, boats take over; the island once belonged to the monks of its Norman look-alike, Mont-Saint-Michel.
Q 22Who built the open-air Minack Theatre on the cliffs at Porthcurno?
Rowena Cade
Rowena Cade. She bought the headland for £100 and shaped the terraces herself with her gardeners, carrying sand up from the beach to make concrete that passes for carved stone.
Q 23Which Shakespeare play opened the Minack Theatre in 1932?
The Tempest
Q 14By the rules of its protected status, where must a genuine Cornish pasty be crimped?
Along the side
Along the side. The 2011 protected-status rules demand a D-shape crimped to one side and made in Cornwall; as the trade body puts it, if it's not crimped, it's not Cornish.
Q 15Besides beef, potato and onion, which vegetable belongs in a traditional Cornish pasty?
Swede
Swede. Confusingly, the Cornish call it turnip, and the protected recipe allows no other vegetable beyond the potato and onion, so a carrot disqualifies the pasty.
Q 16Stargazy pie, with fish heads poking through the crust, comes from which Cornish village?
Mousehole
Mousehole. The pie is baked each December for Tom Bawcock's Eve, in honour of a fisherman said to have sailed into a storm and landed enough fish to end a famine in the village.
Q 17Which Cornish product has protected status and cannot legally be made under that name outside Cornwall?
Clotted cream
Clotted cream. Cornish custom spreads the jam on the scone first and crowns it with the cream, while Devon's puts the cream on first, an order the two counties still argue over.
Q 18The Eden Project near St Austell was built inside what?
A reclaimed china clay pit
A reclaimed china clay pit. The worked-out pit sat 15 metres below the water table, so it flooded during building, and it had no soil until the team made their own from waste.
Q 19Which James Bond film shot scenes in the Eden Project's biomes soon after they opened in 2001?
Die Another Day
Die Another Day. The giant domes doubled as the inside of the villain's diamond mine in Pierce Brosnan's final outing as Bond, released in 2002.
Q 20Which 12th-century writer first named Tintagel as the place where King Arthur was conceived?
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Geoffrey of Monmouth. His story came first: a century later Richard, Earl of Cornwall, built the castle whose ruins stand there today, on a site of no military value, seemingly because of the legend.
The Tempest. The local players had been performing A Midsummer Night's Dream in a meadow, and for a play that opens with a shipwreck they were offered a cliff garden above the sea instead.
Q 24The chimneyed ruins beside the shafts of Cornwall's World Heritage mines were built to house what?
Steam engines
Steam engines. Pumping engines drained the workings so that shafts could be sunk far deeper, and emigrating Cornishmen built the same engine houses as far away as Mexico.
Q 25Which Cornishman ran a locomotive on rails in 1804, two decades before Stephenson's Stockton and Darlington line?
Richard Trevithick
Richard Trevithick. His locomotive hauled ten tons of iron and 70 men for more than eight miles in South Wales, but it proved too heavy for the rails and ended up driving a forge hammer at the ironworks.
Q 26Cornish chemist Humphry Davy is best remembered for inventing what?
The miners' safety lamp
The miners' safety lamp. Davy built it in 1815 for coal pits, where gas exploded on meeting a naked flame; his answer was to screen the flame behind fine wire gauze.
Q 27In 1901 Marconi's clifftop station at Poldhu in Cornwall sent the first radio signal across which body of water?
The Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean. Marconi reported hearing three Morse dots, the letter S, in Newfoundland, some 2,200 miles away, on an aerial held up by a kite.
Q 28Who automatically holds the title Duke of Cornwall?
The monarch's eldest son
The monarch's eldest son. Edward III wrote the rule into the 1337 charter that created the duchy for the Black Prince, so no daughter can hold the title and without a son it rests with the Crown.
Q 29In 1497 Cornish rebels angry at a war tax marched east until beaten outside which city?
London
London. A blacksmith, Michael An Gof, and a lawyer, Thomas Flamank, led them as far as Blackheath, where Henry VII's much larger army broke the rising in June 1497.
Q 30Who played Ross Poldark in the BBC's 2015 series, forty years after Robin Ellis?
Aidan Turner
Aidan Turner. He played Winston Graham's soldier home from the American war, and Robin Ellis, the Ross of 1975, came back to join the new cast in a supporting role.