North Hessary Tor

About North Hessary Tor

North Hessary Tor is a 517-metre hill just above Dartmoor Prison at Princetown, within Dartmoor Forest civil parish in the borough of West Devon, England. The tor is one of the boundary points mentioned in the perambulations of the Forest of Dartmoor.

On the summit stands the North Hessary Tor transmitting station, an FM radio and television transmitter using a guyed mast 196 metres high. It was built by the BBC in 1955, when a transmitter was needed to introduce 405-line television into Devon; FM radio transmissions began in 1956 and cover most of Devon and eastern parts of Cornwall, while a small UHF television transmitter now serves Princetown and Dartmoor.

Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on North Hessary Tor (CC BY-SA 4.0). Heights, prominence and grid references come from the Database of British & Irish Hills, not from Wikipedia.

Access rights here

General position for England — local byelaws, seasonal restrictions and closures can override it. Full details: access rights in England ·check another location.

Daylight at this summit today

Sunrise

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Sunset

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Daylight

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Civil twilight ends

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Computed astronomically for 50.550, -4.008. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.

Finding the summit

The recorded summit point is trig point on rock tor. On broad or flat summits the obvious cairn is not always the true high point.

Survey method

obvious summit

Record revised

10-Mar-07

Drop measured from

SX575750 · 454 m

Survey notes are field observations recorded in the Database of British & Irish Hills (v18.3, CC BY 4.0) by the hill-surveying community.

Get food nearby

3 places to eat or drink within 10 km of the summit, rated under the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (Scotland runs its own Food Hygiene Information Scheme, a pass/fail equivalent).

Classifications and ratings are the local authority's own and can be coarse — this is a lead, not a guarantee of opening hours or that food is served to non-residents. Follow a name through to the official rating page to check, and confirm before you rely on it.

Food hygiene data from the Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland (Open Government Licence v3.0). Distances and directions computed by OpenFell from the summit.

Which hill this one belongs to

North Hessary Tor is not counted as an independent hill in its own right. In prominence terms it belongs to High Willhays (622 m) — the nearest Marilyn you can reach from this summit without first dropping below its key col, 454 m.

Grouping is by prominence alone: a summit belongs to the nearest higher Marilyn it connects to without a deeper intervening col. Over a large massif that can gather hills no one would walk in a single day, and which few would describe as parts of the same mountain — it is a measure of independence, not a suggested route.

Nearest listed peaks