Tintagel () or Trevena (, meaning Village on a Mountain) is a civil parish and village situated on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. The village and nearby Tintagel Castle are associated with the legends surrounding King Arthur and in recent times have become a tourist attraction.Dyer (2005); p. 9 It was claimed by Geoffrey of Monmouth that the castle was the place of Arthur's conception.
Toponymy
Toponymists have had difficulty explaining the origin of 'Tintagel': the probability is that it is Norman French, as the Cornish of the 13th century would have lacked the soft 'g' ('i/j' in the earliest forms: see also Tintagel Castle). If it is Cornish then 'Dun' would mean Fort. Oliver Padel proposes 'Dun' '-tagell' meaning narrow place in his book on place-names.Padel, O. J. (1985) Cornish Place-name Elements. Nottingham: English Place-Name Society There is a possible cognate in the Channel Islands named Tente d'Agel, but that still leaves the question subject to doubt.Canner (1982), p. 97.
The name first occurs in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136, in Latin) as Tintagol, implying pronunciation with a hard [g] sound as in modern English girl. But in Layamon's Brut (MS Cotton Otho C.xi, f. 482), in early Middle English, the name is rendered as Tintaieol. The letter i in this spelling implies a soft consonant like modern English j; the second part of the name would be pronounced approximately as -ageul would be in modern French.
An oft-quoted Celtic etymology in the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names,Mills, A. D. (1998) Dictionary of English Place-Names; 2nd ed. Oxford University Press accepts the view of Padel (1985) that the name is from Cornish *din meaning fort and *tagell meaning neck, throat, constriction, narrow (Celtic *dūn, "fort" = Irish dún, "fort", cf. Welsh dinas, "city"; *tagell = Welsh tagell, "gill, wattle").
The modern-day village of Tintagel was always known as Trevena () until the Post Office started using 'Tintagel' as the name in the mid-19th century. Until then, 'Tintagel' had been restricted to the name of the headland and of the parish.
Area and population Treknow is the largest of the other settlements in the Tintagel parish, which also include Bossiney, Truas, Trebarwith, Tregatta, Trenale, Trethevy, Treven, Trevillet, and Trewarmett. The population of the entire parish was 1,725 at the 2021 census, and 1,727 at the 2011 census, down from 1,820 people at the 2001 census, and the area of the parish is .Thomas (1993); p. 9. (The population recorded in the 2011 census was 1,782 but this includes Knightsmill in the parish of St Teath.United Kingdom Census 2011 including Bossiney and Knightsmill.)
An electoral ward also exists extending inland to Otterham. The population of this ward at the same census was 3,990.
History and government
A small cliff castle was established at Bossiney in Norman times, probably before the Domesday Survey of 1086. In Domesday Book, there are certainly two manors in this parish, a probable third being Trethevy.
Bossiney and Trevena were established as a borough in 1253 by Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall. Bossiney, which included Trevena, was held from the monks of Bodmin by the Earl of Cornwall. There was land for six ploughs and 30 acres () of pasture. Before the Conquest, it had been held from the monks by Alfwy. The monks of Bodmin held Treknow themselves. There was land for eight ploughs and 100 acres () of pasture.Thorn, C., et al. (eds.) (1979) Cornwall. Chichester: Phillimore; entry 4,13 Tintagel was one of the 17 Antiqua maneria of the Duchy of Cornwall.Hatcher, John (1970) Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall 1300–1500. Cambridge University Press The parish feast traditionally celebrated at Tintagel was 19 October, the feast day of St Denys, patron of the chapel at Trevena. The proper date is 9 October, but the feast was moved forward due to the calendar reform of 1752. The market hall and the site of the fair were near the chapel.
The Tithe Commissioners' survey was carried out in 1840–41 and recorded the area of the parish as , of which arable and pasture land was . The land owned by the largest landowner, Lord Wharncliffe, amounted to , and there was of glebe land. Precise details of the size and tenure of every piece of land are given.Canner (1982); pp. 74–75.Assessionable Manors Commission. Award for the Manor of Tintagel. 1846 Sidney Madge did research into the history of the parish and compiled a manuscript Records of Tintagel in 1945.5 vols.; 1867 pp. British Library 10359.e.1. The villages of Trevena and Bossiney were until the early 20th century separated by fields along Bossiney Road.
Trebarwith was the scene of the shipwreck of the Sarah Anderson in 1886, where all aboard perished, but the most famous of the wrecks happened on 20 December 1893 at Lye Rock, when the barque Iota was driven against the cliff. The crew were able to get onto the rock and, apart from a youth of 14, were saved by four men, three of which were from Tintagel. One of these, Charles Hambly, received a Vellum testimonial and three medals for bravery afterwards. The story is told in verse by Joseph Brown in his 1897 poem Musings on Tintagel and its Heroes.Printed by Wakefield & Sons, Camelford; also published by M. C. Atkinson, Liskeard, 1904. The youth was buried in Tintagel Churchyard and the grave is marked by a wooden cross. His name is given in the bureaucratic Italian usage, surname first: Catanese Domenico.Canner, A. C. (1982) The Parish of Tintagel; pp. 87–88Taylor, William (1930) History of Tintagel; pp. 58–59. On 6 July 1979, Tintagel was briefly subject to national attention when an RAF Hawker Hunter fighter aircraft crashed into the village following an engine malfunction. The unusual incident caused significant damage and consternation, but no deaths.
The borough of Bossiney was given the right to send two MPs to Parliament c. 1552 and continued to do so until 1832 when its status as a borough was abolished. For the purposes of local government, Tintagel is currently a civil parish and councillors are elected every four years. The principal local authority in this area is Cornwall Council, but until March 2009 the parish was in the area of North Cornwall District Council. Parish council minutes can be found on Tintagel Web. From 1894 to 1974, the parish was in the Camelford Rural District.
Arthurian legend
As described in Geoffrey's popular Historia, Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, put his wife Igraine in Tintagol while he was at war (posuit eam in oppido Tintagol in littore maris: "he put her in the oppidum Tintagol on the shore of the sea"). Merlin disguised Uther Pendragon as Gorlois so that Uther could enter Tintagel and impregnate Igraine while pretending to be Gorlois; Uther and Igraine's child was King Arthur. This motif became the standard origin story of Arthur in subsequent medieval chronicles and chivalric romances. In modern era, the association of Tintagel with Arthur's birthplace was popularised by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in Idylls of the King.
Some events of the Tristan and Iseult legend are also set at Tintagel. Modern works such as Algernon Charles Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse and Thomas Hardy's The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse perpetuated that association.
Tourists can visit King Arthur's Great Halls at Trevena which is a substantial building of the early 1930s. The Artognou stone, which was discovered in 1998, has added to the legend, although historians do not believe the inscription refers to King Arthur.
Archaeology and architecture The Ravenna Cosmography, of around 700, makes reference to Purocoronavis (almost certainly a corruption of Durocornovium), 'a fort or walled settlement of the Cornovii': the location is unidentified, but Tintagel and Carn Brea have both been suggested. If this is correct then it would have been on the site of Tintagel Castle. Excavations around Tintagel Castle have supported the notion of trade goods there, with ships from along the Atlantic Coast and the Mediterranean Sea bringing pots carrying wine or oil, in the Early medieval period. The site appeared to be one of the places where a local king or warlord, perhaps of Dumnonia, and his entourage settled for a time, and traded with ships arriving from those far ports.
Excavations
Major excavations beginning with C. A. 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 either a high status Celtic monastery (according to Ralegh Radford) or a princely fortress as well as trading settlement dating to the 5th and 6th centuries (according to later excavators), 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 previously considered to be, for an extensive trade in high-value goods was taking place at the time with the Mediterranean region.
Finds from the excavations are preserved at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro. In 1998, excavations discovered the Artognou stone, which has added to Tintagel's Arthurian lore, although historians do not believe the inscription refers to King Arthur. Two seasons of excavation work were undertaken in Tintagel churchyard in the early 1990s.Nowakowski, Jacqueline A.; Thomas, Charles (1992) Grave News From Tintagel: an Account of a Second Season of Archaeological Excavations at Tintagel Churchyard. Truro: Cornwall Archaeological Unit
Antiquities The largest of the Bronze Age barrows is at the highest point in the parish, Condolden, another is at Menadue, and there are a number of others along the cliffs. In the Iron Age there were probably fortifications at Willapark and Barras Head, and inland at Trenale Bury. Two of the Roman milestones found in Cornwall are at Tintagel (the earlier of the two is described under Trethevy: the later one was found in the walls of the churchyard in 1889 and is preserved in the church. The inscription can be read as '[I]mp C G Val Lic Licin' which would refer to the Emperor Licinius (d. 324).Canner, A. C. (1982) The Parish of Tintagel. Camelford: A. C. Canner; pp. 2–4.Collingwood, R. G. (1965) The Roman Inscriptions of Britain. I: Inscriptions on stone; no 2231. (Collingwood described it in 1923.)
There are many other relics of antiquity to be found here such as the so-called King Arthur's Footprint on the Island and a carved rock from Starapark which has been placed outside the Sir James Smith's School at Dark Lane, Camelford. Rodney Castleden has written about these as Bronze Age ritual objects. "King Arthur's Footprint" is a hollow in the rock at the highest point of Tintagel Island's southern side. It is not entirely natural, having been shaped by human hands at some stage.Ralls-MacLeod, Karen & Robertson, Ian (2003) The Quest for the Celtic Key. Luath Press. ; p. 116. It may have been used for the inauguration of kings or chieftains as the site is known to have a long history stretching back to the Dark Ages. The name is probably a 19th-century invention by the castle guide.