A medieval market town, with a charter of 1259 granting market, fair and borough status.

An inland highway town in north Cornwall, Camelford sits on the main road (A39) that skirts the north-west side of Bodmin Moor on its way from Bude in the north to Wadebridge in the west, or, anciently, from London in the east to Falmouth in the west. Other main roads from Bodmin (B3266) and Launceston meet the A39 a little out of town, on its west and east sides respectively. Camelford is, as its name suggests, beside a crossing point on the principal river of this district. The Camel rises just four kilometres to the north, but is already a fairly strong water body set in a steep-sided valley with a narrow floor by the time it reaches the town. Winds whipping in off the sea and whistling over the fine quarrying village of Delabole are rarely experienced as such bitter beasts by the citizens of nicely sheltered Camelford. While they may therefore be warmer, the people receive a little less sunshine (being in a valley) and have to climb out of the old settlement to its later extensions to experience the extensive and inspiring views over the north Cornish countryside. Roughtor and Brown Willy, the two great tor-topped hills of Bodmin Moor dominate the south-east and equally exposed but more gently rolling hills and downs run off to the north and east towards the heights of Condolden and Davidstow. The Camel’s deep wooded valley curves away to the south on its long circuitous course to Nanstallon, Wadebridge and Padstow and finally to the sea at Stepper Point.

The historic landscape around Camelford is predominantly Anciently Enclosed Land, farmland first enclosed in later prehistory, reorganised in the medieval period into strip fields and then enclosed into distinctively Cornish fields, many reflecting their former strippy shapes, in the later medieval and early post-medieval periods. The Upland Rough Ground of Bodmin Moor has been pushed further away to the south-east by the 19th century intakes on the higher parts of Advent parish, farms like Lowermoor, Edenvale, Poldue and Roughtor. Indeed the Moor only really begins, in the sense of being open rough grassland, at Roughtor Ford. From here the mountain of Roughtor rears up, its rocky mane shaking streams of stones down the grassy slopes, stones that resolve themselves into ruined prehistoric houses and enclosures. This is Camelford’s special place, a magical retreat much more important for the spirit of its inhabitants than the Arthurian myths that have become attached to the place.

Other intakes spread away toward Davidstow and partly encircle the concrete remains of the great World War Two airfield on Davidstow Moor. Camelford is thus a town embedded in the countryside, a rural town providing services to country people. The town’s principal street, Fore Street, climbs diagonally up the steep valley side from the south-east corner of the medieval Market Place. It runs on to become High Street once it crests the rise and here, on the flatter ground, is the old fairground. A network of narrow opeways links Fore Street with another steeply climbing medieval street, a service lane originally called Back Street, but now Chapel Street (from a 19th century Methodist chapel). Other alleys slope off to the river to the east and lanes climb up to farmland to the west. Across the river, development is relatively late; just a few houses by the bridge are earlier than the 19th century and the late Victorian relocated Sir James Smith’s school in College Road once stood alone, surrounded by fields. The main road to the east, climbing up a slightly gentler slope in a natural declivity, was brought into the town in the 19th century as an essentially residential area called Victoria Road. A similar strip of ribbon development to the south of the town, High Street, is rather earlier.