Qualla: Rough Tor

Rough Tor: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy F at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. Locals once called it Router, and into the late twentieth century some still did. Then the spelling tightened on the maps and the older sound thinned out, but the hill itself has barely flinched. Rough Tor rises 1,313 feet above the wind-flattened heath of Bodmin Moor, its granite crown bristling with weathered outcrops that look, from a distance, like the spine of something half-buried. A mile to the south-east stands Brown Willy, Cornwall's highest point. Between them, the De Lank River wakes up from a moorland source and starts its run to the sea. Walk the path from the car park at Roughtor Ford and you climb into a landscape that has been continuously occupied, contested, and remembered for five thousand years.

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Image: Andy F at English Wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Rough Tor: A Crown Built by Hand

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rarb, CC BY 3.0. The summit is not simply rock. It is rock and intention, layered. Sometime in the Neolithic, people climbed this hill and began building a tor enclosure - rough stone walls woven between the natural outcrops, originally ringing the entire crown with stone-lined openings. Inside t...

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Image: Rarb | CC BY 3.0

Rough Tor: The Bronze Age Neighbourhood

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roger Cornfoot, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the Bronze Age, the moorland around Rough Tor had become something close to a small city of stone. On the southern slopes, the remains of dozens of hut circles still huddle in clusters, grouped around three or four larger enclosures that probably held livestock. A field system...

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Image: Roger Cornfoot | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rough Tor: St Michael on the Summit

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martinvl, CC BY-SA 4.0. Long after the Bronze Age communities had drifted away, the summit was sanctified again. A medieval chapel was built into the side of one of the cairns at the top of the tor, dedicated to St Michael and recorded in the fourteenth century. It is the only known hilltop chapel on Bo...

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Image: Martinvl | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rough Tor: Wrestlers, Tourists, and Du Maurier

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roger Cornfoot, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the 1800s, Cornish wrestling tournaments were held on the slopes of Rough Tor as part of larger moorland festivals - prize bouts on the granite turf, audiences spread out across the heath. By 1927, a Ward Lock travel guide was recommending the tor to visitors, calling its scen...

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Image: Roger Cornfoot | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rough Tor: Three Tors, One Ridge

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. What walkers usually call Rough Tor is really three. Showery Tor sits to the north, sometimes nicknamed Flat Cap Ned for its distinctive capstone. Little Rough Tor stands between, and Rough Tor proper crowns the southern end of the ridge. A logan stone - a massive boulder balance...

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0