People often wonder how high Table Mountain is, and where the highest point is. Its Maclear’s Beacon, and when you find it, please remember it is a National Monument; don’t climb it or alter it in any way!
The highest point on Table Mountain is towards the eastern end of the plateau and is marked by Maclear’s Beacon, a stone cairn built in 1865 by Sir Thomas Maclear for a trigonometrical survey. It is 1086 metres above sea level, about 19 metres higher than the cable station at the western end of the plateau. [1]
Sir Thomas Maclear (17 March 1794–14 July 1879) was an Irish-born South African astronomer who became Her Majesty’s astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope.
In 1750 Abbe Nicolas Louis de Lacaille had measured a triangulation arc northwards from Cape Town, to determine the shape of the earth and found that the curvature of the earth was less in southern latitudes than at corresponding northern ones. Sir George Everest visited the Cape in 1820 and visited the site of LaCaille’s measurements. From his experience in the Himalayas, he believed that the presence of considerable mountain masses in the Cape could have caused false measurements to be made by LaCaille. Between 1841 and 1848 Maclear would be occupied in performing a geodesic survey for the purpose of recalculating the dimensions and shape of the Earth. [2]
References:
- Table Mountain. (2022, October 18). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_Mountain
- Thomas Maclear. (2022, May 17). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Maclear
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