A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1190 entries
tor
A tor is a free-standing mass of bare rock rising abruptly from a hilltop or a slope, usually granite, usually broken into stacked horizontal blocks with rounded edges, as though something enormous had built a cairn. Dartmoor carries hundreds, and they occur across upland Britain, Scandinavia, Africa, and Australia wherever a jointed hard rock has weathered in the same way.
Etymology
The word is Old English and is one of very few in the language taken from the Britons who were there first, related to the Welsh twr, a heap or a pile. It is one of the three hill words stacked in Torpenhow.
Notes
The blocky form comes from the joints. Granite cools with a grid of fractures through it, weathering works down into them while the rock is still buried under soil, and the corners round off underground; when the soil is later stripped away what stands up is the least-jointed core with its rounded blocks exposed. A tor is therefore mostly a subsurface feature that has been uncovered rather than a thing carved by wind.