Our docent carried a book of Jeffers poetry with her and read appropriate poems as we went. My mother and father, then in their early 80’s, came with me. My favorite tour was the first one I took. I have taken three tours and each one was very different. This is the first structure that Jeffers would build on the five acres of land he purchased on Carmel Point for $500.00.

Looking to the right you will see the house. To get beyond that fence, take a docent-led tour of the house, garden and tower. The low ceilings helped retain the heat from the fireplace. It was built to withstand the often cold winds off the Pacific. Why block out that view? Why so small? So dark? Yet five minutes into a tour of Tor House, you find it hard to imagine a more magical dwelling.

This dream home of the poet Robinson Jeffers-a cramped stone cottage with low ceilings, minuscule windows, and heavy, somber furnishings-seems all wrong. Una wanted a house modeled on a Tudor barn, so the couple hired a stonemason Jeffers signed on as his apprentice, working until “my fingers had the art to make stone love stone.” “It was evident that we had come, without knowing it,” Jeffers later wrote, “to our inevitable place.” That year they bought five acres of land on a cliff at Carmel Point that encompassed a dramatic outcropping of rock-a tor in Scottish Gaelic. His routine was to work on his poetry in the mornings and to work on his building projects, such as Hawk Tower and expanding Tor House, in the afternoons.In 1914, Robinson Jeffers and his wife, Una, settled in Carmel, drawn to the rugged coastline that reminded them of Great Britain. He lived out the rest of his life in Tor House, while continuing to add on to it. The Carmel area's influence in Robinson Jeffers' work becomes apparent in his poems such as his work “The Purse Seine,” a poem about the local fishing industry. He described the land he chose as the site for the house as being like a 'prow and plunging cutwater” of a ship.

Jeffers named it ' Tor' house after the type of ground on which the house was situated, a rocky outcrop known as a 'tor'. Jeffers began construction on Tor House in 1919 and with the aid of a stonemason completed it in the same year.

Tor house tower hawk