Brown Willy Cornwall
Brown Willy is the highest point in Cornwall at 420 metres, a moorland tor on Bodmin Moor that rises above the surrounding peat bog and rough grassland to provide the most elevated viewpoint on the peninsula. Despite its modest altitude by the standards of the Welsh or Scottish hills, Brown Willy has the quality of genuine upland terrain, the exposed granite summit rising from a plateau of waterlogged moorland that can be demanding to cross in wet conditions and that provides a genuine sense of wild country in the heart of the Cornish peninsula.
The name Brown Willy derives from the Cornish Bronn Wennili, meaning swallow's hill or breast of swallows, a name that reflects the Celtic language origins of Cornish place names on the moor and the long human history of this upland landscape that extends from the Neolithic period through Bronze Age settlements to the medieval and early modern tin mining and farming communities that worked the moor until relatively recent times. The Bronze Age settlements on Bodmin Moor, including the remarkable village and field system at Rough Tor nearby, are some of the best-preserved in Britain.
Rough Tor, which lies close to Brown Willy and is in some ways a more interesting summit, is a great rocky outcrop on the neighbouring hill that provides dramatic viewpoints over the surrounding moor and contains the traces of a Neolithic enclosure and Bronze Age cairns and hut circles that make it one of the most archaeological-rich upland areas in Cornwall. The two summits are usually walked together from the car park at Roughtor Farm, providing a circuit of approximately five kilometres across classic Cornish moorland.
Bodmin Moor as a whole provides a very different experience of Cornwall from the coastal attractions for which the county is most famous, its dark, open landscape of granite tors and peat bog offering solitude and natural beauty of an austere, northern character that surprises many visitors to what they expect to be a purely coastal county.