Dartmoor quiz
What is the total length of the West Okement River?
← Browse Tors & Landmarks · Browse the directory
Main image: Photo: Own Herby talk thyme, Wikimedia Commons
- Parish: Dartmoor Forest
- Height: 438 m
- Grid reference: SX 6261 6981
- Rock: Granite
- Also called: Fox Tor Mires, The Mammoth Skull (one outcrop)
Fox Tor is a granite tor of 438 m on the southern moor, with three main outcrops. The southern pile holds a fallen summit rock with two large rock basins that look like sunken eyes, the larger about three feet across. The two northern piles include one with a shallow basin, and the summit has the remains of an old letterbox site. Eric Hemery called the two northern piles Eden Phillpotts's twin turrets.
To the south lies Fox Tor Mires, a desolate and featureless morass. Beyond the newtake wall, in the Sand Parks, stands Childe's Tomb, where, according to Henry Carrington (1834), John Childe of Plymstock died of exposure after killing his horse for warmth. Whiteworks tin mine lies to the north.
Fox Tor on the Tavy at Mary Tavy is a different place: a low riverside crag of 207 m on private land.
This is a location on Dartmoor that has a namesake. Read more about this: Dartmoor Places With the Same Name
Explore further
Contact us if you have information about this listing
Explore the area
Go deeper with Dartefacts
Dartefacts is a database of Dartmoor sites with far more close-up detail than we can show here, and it is the best place to go deeper. Dartefacts is free to use, and nobody has to pay to look things up. If you want more, a yearly subscription adds 10-figure grid references, map zoom down to 1:25,000 and lists to tick off the places you have visited, and it helps keep the site going. We would encourage you to subscribe.
Thoughts
Be the first to share a thought about Fox Tor (Fox Tor Mires).
Share a thought
Photograph by Glavind Strachan Photography“In Peter Tavy, too, may be seen " the spinners and knitters in the sun ; " and the very old and the very young are often seen together side by side ; and girls with their pitchers filling them with water from the little channels and rivulets that abound throughout the village. These present ...”
Also on Our DartmoorFour hut circles with slab-lined doorways near Leeden Tor — Four stone hut circles, 4.6 to 7.4 m across, all with slab-lined doorways, in an unenclosed settlement on a south-west slope above the Walkham.
Know another Dartmoor place, tor or landmark we should include? Suggest a listing, it is free.
Suggest a listing