Tintagel
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Situated on the north Atlantic coast of Cornwall, the village of Tintagel (pronounced with the stress on the second syllable; Cornish: Dintagell) and nearby Tintagel Castle are associated in every mind with the legends surrounding King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The village has, in recent times, become a magnet for tourists and day-trippers.
The modern-day village of Tintagel was known as Trevena (Cornish: Tre war Venydh). The chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth made no mention of Tintagel as Arthur's birthplace; until Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote "Idylls of the King" placing Arthur's birth on the shingle beach below Tintagel, there was no local tradition to connect the place with King Arthur at all [1] (http://www.channel4.com/history/timeteam/archive/2000arthur.html). The Victorians renamed it to promote tourism on the back of the King Arthur and Camelot legends. Strictly speaking, Tintagel is just the name of the headland.
Major excavations beginning with Ralegh Radford's work in the 1930s on and around the site of the 12th century castle have revealed that Tintagel headland was the site of a high status Celtic monastery (according to Radford), a princely fortress or trading settlement dating to the 5th and 6th centuries, in the period immediately following the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain. Finds of Mediterranean oil and wine jars show that Sub-Roman Britain was not the isolated outpost it was considered to be, for considerable trade in high value goods was taking place at the time with the Mediterranean region early/origins/rom_celt/romessay.html (http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/).
Tintagel is also the title of an orchestral tone poem by Sir Arnold Bax.
External link
- Tintagel (DMOZ.org) (http://dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Cornwall/Tintagel/)
- Archaeology (http://www.gla.ac.uk/archaeology/projects/tintagel/ttg2.html/)de:Tintagel