Tintagel

Geoffrey of Monmouth set the whole cycle on this rock around 1136. When Uther Pendragon's desire for Igraine broke his court, her husband Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, placed her for safety in Tintagel, a fortress, Geoffrey says, on the sea at the farthest edge of Cornwall, girded by the waves on every side, with no way in but a single narrow rock path that three armed men could hold against a kingdom. Force could not touch it, so the story sent in magic instead. Merlin gave Uther the duke's own face, the guards opened to their lord, and in the chamber above the sea Arthur was conceived, on the very night the real Gorlois died at his other castle. The legend keeps the conception and the geography precisely: an impregnable place entered by deception, so that the greatest king in story begins in a locked room, in the dark, in disguise. Malory follows Geoffrey, and the later tradition has gone further and made Tintagel Arthur's birthplace as well, the castle from whose postern gate the infant was handed to Merlin's keeping.

The fortress has a second legendary life as the dark double of Camelot. In the Tristan romances, and in Malory's Book of Sir Tristram, Tintagel is the seat of King Mark of Cornwall, the husband of Isolde, and the stage of that court's long agony: the drinking of the potion's aftermath, the spies and the dwarf, the lovers discovered and condemned, and in Malory's ending the blow from behind that kills Tristram as he sits harping before his lady. Where Camelot is the court of justice, Tintagel is the court of jealousy, and the same rock holds both the deception that began the age and the envy that poisons it.

Beneath the legend the ground itself has answered back. The headland at Tintagel, a high rock called the Island joined to the cliffs by a narrow neck, was excavated in the 1930s by Ralegh Radford, who read its terraces of buildings as an early Christian monastery. Later work turned that reading on its head. The terraces are the halls and stores of a secular citadel of the 5th and 6th centuries, exactly Arthur's period, occupied by the rulers of Dumnonia, the post-Roman kingdom of Cornwall and Devon. The rubbish is astonishing: amphorae that carried wine and oil from the eastern Mediterranean, fine tableware from North Africa, more imported luxury pottery than at any other British site of the age. Whoever held Tintagel in the 5th century was rich, connected to the trade of the whole known world, and literate: a slate found in 1998 carries the carefully cut Latin of one Artognou, father of a descendant of Col, and a further inscribed slate names members of a cultivated household. The press called the Artognou stone proof of Arthur; the scholars said no such thing, and they are right. But Geoffrey chose for the Duke of Cornwall a place that truly had been a royal fortress of Arthur's century, and the old Welsh records name a Dumnonian ruler, Cunomorus, whom the saints' lives call Mark.

The castle a visitor climbs through today is not the citadel of the legend but its monument. Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III and later elected King of the Romans, bought the headland in the 1230s and built upon it a castle of no military value at all, already old-fashioned as it rose, whose whole purpose was possession of the story: to hold Arthur's fortress was to hold a share of Arthur. His walls are the ruins that crown the Island now. The Victorians completed the work, drawn by Tennyson's Idylls, where Merlin finds the naked babe upon the sands of wild Tintagil; the sea cave beneath the castle took Merlin's name; and our own age has added a bronze figure standing eight feet high upon the cliff and a footbridge that joins the Island to the mainland once more. Every generation builds Tintagel again. Geoffrey set a fiction on a real royal rock, the fiction persuaded an earl to crown it with stone, and the stone keeps the fiction alive. Every Arthurian story is, in the end, a journey back to Tintagel.