An 18th century visitor tries to communicate the atmosphere:
Roche-Rocks (so called from the neighbouring village of St. Roche) are situated in the midst of an open heath, half a mile south from the road leading through Bodmin to Truro, and about six miles from the former place. The country around is naked, barren, and dreary almost beyond conception.
[...] A pile of rocks starting abruptly out of a wide green surface, and covering some space with enormous fragments on which there are only a few vestiges of incipient vegetation, form a singular scene, exhibiting a kind of wild sublimity peculiar to itself. Some of them are full sixty feet in height, and on a projection in one part stands a small Gothic building to all appearance very ancient, and tradition reports that it was once the cell of a hermit.
volume 1 of William Maton’s “Observations relative chiefly to the natural history, picturesque scenery, and antiquities of the western counties of England, made in the years 1794 and 1796.”