Rough Tor

Rough Tor is a granite tor on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, rising to 400 metres above sea level. Three summits form the ridge: Showery Tor, Little Rough Tor and Rough Tor itself. The moorland around is open and windswept, with the De Lank River flowing between Rough Tor and nearby Brown Willy, Cornwall’s highest point. A mile and a half of track leads from the car park to the summit, where a Bronze Age enclosure once stood. The summit walls still trace the old tor enclosure, built to align with natural rock outcrops. The site holds traces of Neolithic settlement, Bronze Age fields and medieval chapels. A Neolithic enclosure encircles the summit, with terraces that may have supported wooden houses and small garden plots. Bronze Age hut circles dot the southern slopes, arranged around stock enclosures and a large field system later overlaid by medieval fields. A 14th-century chapel dedicated to St Michael once crowned the tor, guiding travellers along an ancient trackway across the moor. Visitors find wide views across the moor and the remains of past lives. The memorial to the 43rd (Wessex) Division stands below the tor, while another remembers Charlotte Dymond, murdered here in 1844. Fernacre stone circle lies just 200 metres away, and Stannon stone circle is close by. The moor’s bleak grandeur is captured in travel guides from the 1920s, which called the scenery wildly grand and rugged.