Robinson Jeffers: The Poet and Stone Mason of Tor House

By Victor A. Walsh

Carmel by the Sea was a wild, sparsely populated place when the California poet Robinson Jeffers and his wife Una arrived in 1914. 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.'

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 bould...