Built of granite and brick by Jeffers’ son Donnan in the ’50s, it’s operated by the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, which also manages the historic site. We arrived at the Visitor Center at about 9:30 on a wet, overcast Saturday morning. Not his poetry or verse or place in American letters. My intention, as a mason who works on adobes, was to see, listen, and touch this primeval place of stones-the only words that come to mind-to understand the force of Jeffers words, his spiritual connections to the land itself, and nothing else. This past November with stormy skies and heavy seas looming on the horizon, I visited Tor House with Marleen Fouché, my photographer. Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life.” “Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white seagulls, as they have done for thousands of years, and will for thousands of years to come. “Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions,” Jeffers wrote in 1938. Except for vacations to the British Isles in 1929, 19, periodic visits to the art colony of Taos during the 1930s, and a reading tour in 1941 at the Library of Congress, they never left.

Jeffers called it “our inevitable place.” Buffeted by winds and storms, Tor House would become the couple’s sanctuary, providing a setting for a life of simplicity, harmony, and creativity.

This wild, craggy spot at the Continent’s End was unlike any other place that the widely traveled poet had seen. He named the cottage Tor House, Gaelic for the craggy knoll on which it was built, and the tower after a hawk which flew overhead daily and then disappeared the day it was completed. Over the next decade from 1918 to 1925, Jeffers would hire an Irish stonemason and build the family’s two-story stone cottage and a forty-foot Celtic tower enclosed by sturdy walls all made from granite boulders. Drawn to the rugged coastline that reminded them of West Britain, the young couple bought five large, undeveloped lots on a rocky, wind-battered promontory just south of the village at Carmel Point, which they called ‘Standing Stones.’ Carmel by the Sea was a wild, sparsely populated place when the California poet Robinson Jeffers and his wife Una arrived in 1914.

Tor house carmel