The generations-old controversy about which is the highest point in Wiltshire has at last been settled, thanks to satellite technology.

An Ordnance Survey team using the latest global positioning equipment awarded the honour to Milk Hill.

It has finally topped Tan Hill in Pewsey Vale. Both were shown as the highest points on OS maps at 294 metres or just under 1,000 feet.

The debate was rekindled recently when a local radio presenter asked which really was the highest.

And this week the BBC’s Countryfile TV programme took up the challenge.

Bryan Read, whose family has owned and farmed Milk Hill for three generations, was at the summit when Countryfile presenter Julia Bradbury was joined by two amateur hill measurers.

Graham Jackson and John Bernard made their calculations using GPS-based measuring equipment and they tallied almost exactly with the readings of Paul Denyer from the Ordnance Survey using similar equipment.

They agreed that Milk Hill WAS the highest and measured 294.19 metres compared with Tan Hill which was 293.93 metres above sea level, a difference of 26cms (just under ten and a half inches).

Mr Read said that as far as he was concerned there had never been any question that he owned the highest hill in Wiltshire.“You never know but I always understood it was the tallest of the two,” he said.

Some people believed Tan Hill was the highest because it had a trig point on top, but that meant nothing.

It would only take a couple of barrowloads of soil on top of Tan Hill to make a difference, just as villagers did in the Hugh Grant film, The Englishman Who Climbed a Hill But Came Down a Mountain.

The film tells the story of Welsh village where inhabitants were so determined their hill was a mountain that they formed a human chain to carry soil to the top to take it to over 1,000 feet to swing the balance in its favour!