Tintagel's "Arthurian Graffiti" Controversy, 10 Years On

While we’re in the vicinity of Tintagel [see previous post], I thought we might take a look at the Tintagel ‘Arthur’ inscription ten years on to see if anything more can be learned. For mysteries remain surrounding English Heritage's "find of a lifetime" a decade ago, of some 6th-century quasi-Arthurian graffiti at their prime Arthurian-tourism location, Tintagel.
That spring of 1998, I had intended staying in Cornwall at Easter, but it was bitterly cold, too cold to stay in the damp, windswept mountaintop 18th-C. tin-miner’s cottage I had used as a base of exploration the two previous years. Thus, I didn’t get to re-visit Tintagel and see the dig in progress. The following spring, I did an online search of the British and US press to see if there had been any additional developments beyond the near identical clutch of stories of the previous summer; but there was nothing. The story seemed to have stalemated between excitement and scepticism. However we can try and take the mystery further now. And I thought it worthwhile to give the account of the controversy in some detail here, as a linked feature, since the Glasgow U. archaeology department pages cited by Wikipedia as their source have for some reason been taken down.
Though the writing found in 1998 was not an ancient manuscript, but carved on stone, it is still of interest here. This is the first known example of Dark Ages literacy outside of Church and court documents: as the man running the dig, Prof Chris Morris of Glasgow U., put it, "the first evidence we have that the skills of reading and writing were handed down in a non-religious context".
The use of Latin was common on the Continent, where the native Gaulish was extinguished and replaced by Vulgate Latin, from which the Romance languages (literally, Roman-ish) such as French, Spanish etc are derived. Despite English historians' claims England was thoroughly Romanised, there is no evidence Vulgate Latin ever caught on in Britain or the Britons ever spoke a Romance language. English historians also earlier suggested Britons were illiterate, with no written language of their own. It has also been suggested the controversial ART- inscription found in 1998 was a Gallic rather than local dialect of Latin. The Continental connection is also worth exploring here as the Arthurian legend was nurtured in France by British exiles who fled across the Channel, so that it reappeared in French Romances. And this avenue of exploration turns up a surprising link. Could more than a tradition of swordsmanship connect the legendary wielder of Excalibur with the Finest Swordsman In All France?
[read feature ‘Tintagel And The Arthurian Controversy’ ]

From Merlin’s Cave To Hercules’s Headland

A remote corner of Britain’s coast has suddenly become a target of Google searches. North Devon, and the Hartland Peninsula in particular, have become popular search terms among would-be visitors. This is for reasons unrelated to our subject-area here - its use as a location in BBC-TV’s new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility. (Just finished on BBC, it’s now out on DVD, and is being shown in the USA as part of a “Complete Jane Austen” TV season.) But I thought it might be an opportune time to follow up our earlier blog item on the North Cornwall and Devon heritage coast, for legend has it this coast was on the sea-route by which Christianity arrived in Britain via Joseph of Arimatheia and his fellow disciples.
Though I’d spent a week in the region in June, I’d planned to return there in September, since midsummer gales had caused cancellation of our planned boat trip out to Lundy Island. Lundy is one of various coastal sites in SW Britain where there are legends Joseph of Arimatheia landed and founded a pre-Roman Christian church. Unfortunately come September, Lundy was closed and its 30-odd population evacuated, due to a nasty outbreak of norovirus. Nevertheless, although I haven’t been able to get out there yet (no sailings till spring due to rough waters all around Lundy), my previous blog item A Dark Ages 'Rough Guide' Travel Codex has given me the idea of doing something similar with this stretch of coast. This dealt with Simon Young’s AD 500: A Journey Through The Dark Ages Of Britain And Ireland, a modern elaboration of a genre of ancient codex, the coastal navigation guide which the early Greeks called periplus. (It literally means sailing or navigating right through, i.e. all the way to your destination, implying a long-distance route.) These early travel guides were no doubt compiled from the experience of more than one trip, as we’re doing here. (The Tintagel photo used here is from a 1995 visit.)
Tintagel is the first British landfall in Young’s periplus-reconstruction travel guide, the narrator describing it as the first safe harbour in Britain. This of course is nonsense, but the displays in Tintagel’s heritage centre (where I sheltered from a summer gale for over an hour, making notes) document that it was indeed an international early port for the Mediterranean trade. The coast along here can certainly be forbidding, and the other harbours have to be protected by encircling sea walls. Tintagel had a small harbour known as the Iron Gates, unsuitable for later, larger boats. With its monastic ruin atop a scenic rocky outcrop, the locality is an Arthurian-themed tourist trap (King Arthur’s Pub etc), the cliff-edge Tintagel “Castle” pictured above actually being a hotel. The locality has probably been a tourist destination since 12th-C legendizer Geoffrey of Monmouth had Arthur conceived here via Merlin’s magic, and the large sea-cave [see photo] to the right of the headland ‘neck’ is called Merlin’s Cave. (Later authors including Tennyson so associated the place with the legend that the locals complained when Hallmark declined to film any of their 1998 Merlin miniseries starring Sam Neill here, pronouncing Tintagel “a decrepit ruin.”)
The “Tintagel Castle” boosted by English Heritage is a small headland site, whose protective inaccessibility (now reached by a walkway, pictured) led to its becoming a “high status” Celtic monastery around the time Young writes of, though he suggests it was the palace [Celtic lys] of the king of Dumnonia (Devon). Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be any old Joseph-of-Arimatheia-was-here legend of the sort which occur in the local lore of other ports around SW Britain as well as in the Arthurian Grail tales. (Da Vinci Code fans may be interested that Tintagel has just been in the news for a controversial new painting in the local Catholic church, commissioned for its 40th anniversary, a modernised version of Leonardo’s Last Supper showing the artist’s son as Jesus and locals as the disciples.)
Departing Tintagel, you pass the two arms of the stone-walled harbour guarding the mouth of a mediaeval fishing port hidden up the ravine. This is Boscastle, still being rebuilt since the heavy rains of August 2004 which funnelled a ten-foot wall of water down the ravine, sweeping away 50 cars and much of the town centre, including the town’s main tourist attraction, the Witchcraft Museum. Offshore, as we mentioned in an earlier blog post, a keen viewer of satellite photos last year spotted some undersea ruins which may be part of the ancient coast, long demolished by Atlantic waves.
As you sail north up the Atlantic Heritage Coast into ancient Dumnonia (Devon), you pass the seaside resort of Bude, where the old coastguard lookout is modelled on the octagonal Temple of The Winds in Athens. The long, flat-topped island of Lundy lies dead ahead since the coast trends north here as you approach the massive Hartland Peninsula. Here, bare headlands reveal more strange towers. Just beyond St Catherine’s Tor is the 128’ high 14th-C. tower of St Nectan’s Church just inland of Hartland Quay. Nicknamed ‘the Cathedral of North Devon’, it is Devon’s 2nd-tallest tower, built to be visible for miles as a seamark.
This is where the cliffs begin. These are not the white cliffs for which the south coast is famous and the isle of Albion may have taken its name, but red sandstone, twisted and folded by geological upheavals. The beaches are marked by rock arches tunnelled out by tide and storm. Water cascades into the sea in places, indicating the presence of small hanging valleys otherwise hidden, for the moorland changes here to dense woodland. The only gap in the cliffs is at Mouth Mill, which is uninhabited since an 19th-C. attempt at industrial enterprise was washed away. The cliffs here are so tall when they built a lighthouse in 1874, they couldn’t put it on the clifftop as it would have been too far up (above low-lying sea-mist) to be effective, so it was built on a rock spur, with the cliff rising hundreds of feet behind it. Hartland Point, where the coast turns eastward again was named by the early Mediterranean sailors the Promontory or Headland of Hercules.
The Peninsula continues east to the resort of Clovelly, which is built right into the hillside, on a cobbled street so steep goods are still transported (as I witnessed myself) by human-powered sledge. The famous Clovelly donkeys who with their straw panniers became early postcard stars when the first steamers carrying Victorian day-trippers began to call in here, are no longer much used as beasts of burden, but are kept on as a children’s attraction. (Photos of Hartland Peninsula and Clovelly here.) You can walk from the village west along a clifftop path to a viewpoint by Hartland Point, and see for yourself (look down over the edge) why Ptolemy’s map calls this the ‘Promontory of Hercules’.
The next port of call in Young’s periplus reconstruction skips Lundy, arriving after an overland detour (to Dorset!) at a monastic site north of Lundy, Caldey Island off the south coast of Wales. He describes how the 6th-C. monks there consider visitors’ Roman-style Christianity to be an upstart aberration, but doesn’t elaborate. He makes no reference to the early accounts of Christianity arriving in Britain before the Roman Conquest. No mention of Glastonbury either, which due to the shifting coast was then a sea-port, and has the best-known association with the legend of Joseph of Arimatheia et al. I have no doubt Glastonbury is even more of an internationally searched-for phrase, and perhaps next time we can pay a visit to this legendary ancient sea-port.

Revisiting Cornwall’s Legendary World Heritage Coast

Cornwall has been in the headlines this past week, over the threats from Cornish extremists to burn out English TV-celebrity chefs Rick Stein and Jamie Oliver who have set up seafood-restaurant businesses here. The United Kingdom is officially 200 years old this year, but England’s conquest of its “Celtic” neighbours – Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall – remains a touchy issue. Economically a depressed region, Cornwall is perhaps the least recognized of these Celtic “national regions” as a separate state, though the ancient kingdom of Cornubia or Kernou maintained a quasi-parliament into modern times. This was the Stannary Parliament, which has only “traditional” rather than legislative powers within the UK. Stannary refers to tin-mining (from Latin stannus, tin), its leading industry since records began. Its members sometimes collide with English authority, e.g. by removing the English Heritage signs from the region’s chief tourism site, Tintagel, and by promoting re-establishment of the historically-defunct Cornish Celtic language in official documentation.

The “tin mining” coast of Cornwall and North Devon was designated a year ago by Unesco as a World Heritage Site, putting it on the map, for better or worse, as an international tourism destination. Yet the real heritage of the “tin mining” coast may be more substantial than that represented by the 18th-20th Century industrial ruins along this coast which are the WHS’s official basis. The tin trade stretches back into pre-history, no one knows how far. This is of interest here as the underpinning of the ‘Grail’ legend that Joseph of Arimatheia was a tin-trader who came here bringing the grail and various disciples here post-Crucifixion, as well as the ‘Holy Visit’ Legend, whereby Joseph brought the boy Jesus on one of his earlier voyages. Both were part of the foundation legend of the Church Of Britain in bringing Christianity here soon after the Crucifixion, becoming the first church in Christendom. The CoB was submerged into the Church Of England in the 6th century, which maintained its claims of precedence over Rome for many centuries before trying to shrug it off as the handiwork of a few eccentric vicars in recent times. (It won’t go away entirely, as the legend is referenced in Blake’s Jerusalem – now England’s alternate anthem.)
This month Cornish local authorities are preparing a presentation to the European Parliament to have the county designated a “region of culture” which would open the way for more studies of this neglected, disputed aspect of Cornish heritage. In fact, if Christianity did arrive via this route, it’s more a matter of world heritage.
There’s no dispute that the tin trade stretched back to the Bronze Age, for tin was needed to make good-quality bronze and there was no known tin source in the Mediterranean. Thus Mediterranean traders, usually labelled ‘Phoenician’, sailed here in antiquity, making a flourishing Bronze Age possible, and the market for Cornish tin continued through the Iron Age into the industrial age. Though the most famous site associated with the legend remains Glastonbury, no-one knows the exact port these elusive ‘Phoenicians’ used, and various sites along the Cornish and Devon coast where the tin mining industry was centred also have local “holy visit” legends.

Surprisingly, Tintagel has no local version - even though it’s the most famous of all Cornish heritage sites, it’s all Arthurian. The Visitor Info Centre has a display board quoting a leading 12C churchman that the legend of ‘Arthur the Briton’ was just as well known thousands of miles away in the East. The long-distance tin trade would be an obvious conduit for such legends, long before the Crusades. Another display shows the ancient tin-trade route from ports all round the Eastern Med to Cornwall, while another shows evidence the place once had a proper harbour, with the Homeric name the Iron Gates.
In future posts, I’ll try to trace more of this key legend, when I’ve integrated my notes and photos from my trip down there this past week with earlier research and field notes. At the moment I’m writing this up while listening on CD to music by Sir Arnold Bax, Celtophile English poet and composer of tone poems like The Garden Of Fand and In The Faery Hills. The Tintagel Visitor Centre also plays a video of his most famous work, “Tintagel”, written after his 1917 visit. If you want to conjure up a vision of the lost world of Romantic Celtic myth, you can’t do much better than listen to this symphonic evocation of a legendary seascape.