Qualla: Bodmin Moor

Bodmin Moor: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Some believe Dozmary Pool is the lake where Sir Bedivere threw Excalibur back to the Lady of the Lake. The pool is Cornwall's only natural inland body of water, set high on the southern slopes of Bodmin Moor among the granite tors, and the Arthurian connection has stuck for so long that nobody quite remembers when it started. The whole moor lives in this register: half geology, half legend, ten thousand years of human presence layered onto a slab of Permian granite that has weathered into one of the most distinctive landscapes in southern Britain. At 208 square kilometres it is small enough to walk across in a day and old enough to outlast every settlement that ever tried to organize it.

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Bodmin Moor: Granite from the Permian

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The bedrock formed roughly 290 million years ago, deep underground, when a body of molten rock cooled slowly into the coarse-grained granite that geologists call the Bodmin Moor pluton. It is one of five such plutons in Cornwall, all part of the Cornubian batholith that runs the ...

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Bodmin Moor: Ten Thousand Years of Footprints

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mesolithic hunter-gatherers wandered the area when it was still wooded, leaving flint scatters that show they sat down to knap blades on this hill or that hollow. By the Bronze Age the trees were retreating and the monument-building had begun. Over 300 cairns were raised across t...

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Bodmin Moor: Rivers and Reservoirs

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bodmin Moor is the parent watershed for much of Cornwall. The River Fowey rises at 290 metres elevation and flows down through Lostwithiel to the south coast. The Camel rises on Hendraburnick Down and runs forty kilometres before meeting the sea at Padstow. The Tiddy, the Lynher,...

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Bodmin Moor: The Beast and the Bones

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sightings of large black cats on Bodmin Moor have continued for decades, with grainy photographs and dead sheep periodically generating local panic and national headlines. The Beast of Bodmin is the most famous of the British big cat reports, and the evidence has consistently fai...

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Bodmin Moor: The Inn at the Crossroads

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jamaica Inn stands beside the A30 where the road climbs over the moor at its highest point. Built in 1750 as a coaching inn, it served as a staging post for changing horses on the long haul between Launceston and Bodmin, and acquired a reputation for smuggling that Daphne du Maur...

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