Qualla: River Tamar

River Tamar: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthew Hartley, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Tamar rises on a windswept plateau called Woolley Moor, less than four miles from the Atlantic. It could, you would think, simply tip itself off the cliffs and finish the job in a single afternoon. Instead it turns south. For the next sixty-one miles it draws a line — between fields, under medieval bridges, around the granite tor of Kit Hill — until it slides through Plymouth Sound and into the English Channel. That long looping detour is the reason Cornwall feels like its own country. The Tamar makes Cornwall almost an island. The traditional Cornish line is that the devil himself would never dare cross it, for fear of ending up in a pasty.

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Image: Matthew Hartley | CC BY-SA 2.0

River Tamar: Tamara and the Giants

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Billinger, CC BY-SA 2.0. There are two stories about the name. The respectable one, recorded in Ptolemy's Geography in the second century AD, holds that Tamar simply means "great water" — the same prehistoric root the Thames carries, possibly meaning "dark flowing." The Cornish one is better. A nymph nam...

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Image: Jonathan Billinger | CC BY-SA 2.0

River Tamar: A Border That Moves

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. For most of its course the Tamar marks the official line between Devon and Cornwall. But the line is not as ancient or as fixed as it looks. In the eleventh century several parishes north of Launceston were transferred to Devon when the boundary briefly followed the River Ottery ...

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Image: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data | CC BY-SA 3.0

River Tamar: Bridges, Old and Older

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pierre Terre, CC BY-SA 2.0. Twenty-two road crossings span the Tamar. The oldest still in use is the medieval Horsebridge of 1437 — slender stone arches, six and a half centuries old, still carrying cars across at a single-lane crawl. Greystone Bridge near Lawhitton followed in 1439. Gunnislake New Bridge, ...

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Image: Pierre Terre | CC BY-SA 2.0

River Tamar: The Copper Years

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trevor Rickard, CC BY-SA 2.0. The valley of the lower Tamar became, in the nineteenth century, one of the great mining landscapes of the world. Copper, tin, lead, silver and arsenic poured out of mines on both sides of the river. Morwellham Quay handled the export traffic — copper to South Wales for smelting,...

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Image: Trevor Rickard | CC BY-SA 2.0

River Tamar: King Arthur's Last Battle

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Alliterative Morte Arthure, written somewhere around 1400, places the final battle of King Arthur and Mordred near the banks of the Tamar. The Cornish have always been keen to claim Arthur — Tintagel is just up the coast, and Slaughterbridge near Camelford is one of the candi...

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Image: Brian | CC BY-SA 2.0