Little Hound Tor

• Parish: Dartmoor Forest
• Height: 492 m
• Grid reference: SX 6323 8982
• Rock: Granite
• Name: the Latin form, Parva Hundetorre, means Little Hound Tor

Little Hound Tor is the name the Ordnance Survey puts on a small patch of granite bedrock just below the summit of Little Whit Hill, about 1 km north of Hound Tor on the same ridge, between Cosdon Hill and Hangingstone Hill. The rock hardly rises out of the turf, and Tors of Dartmoor says it barely deserves the word tor. It is a viewpoint rather than a climb, looking across Taw Marsh. The White Moor stone circle, 18 stones, lies to the south east, and White Moor Stone is close by.

The name goes back to the Perambulation of 1240, the first written record of the forest bounds, which runs from Cosdon to "parva Hundetorre", the little Hound Tor. Which hill the jurors meant has been argued over ever since, and the answers differ:

• A Devonshire Association paper on the bounds of the forest (volume 24, 1892) reasoned that a little Hound Tor implies a great one, and that the great one is the present Hound Tor. So the bound was a smaller hill nearby: a hill crowned by a tumulus (a burial mound) near Raybarrow Pool, or, in Charles Spence Bate's view, Shelstone Tor.
• William Crossing's Guide to Dartmoor takes the opposite view: Hound Tor itself is the "parva Hundetorre" of 1240, and the line is drawn from White Moor Stone to the tor.
• Eric Hemery, followed by Tors of Dartmoor, says the name on the map is an error. Hemery found a ruined cairn and a few stones here, not a tor, and called the real tor Round Tor.

The 1609 survey calls the bound "little Houndetorr" as well, and 1880s lists give Hound Tor at 1,622 ft and a tumulus called Little Hound Tor at 1,608 ft, so the two names were already being used for two neighbouring hills before the present maps. This page follows the map: Little Hound Tor is the Little Whit Hill outcrop, and Hound Tor (Throwleigh) is the tor to the south.

This is a location on Dartmoor that has a namesake. Read more about this: Dartmoor Places With the Same Name