The far-famed "Dundagel" consists of a single grey street, lined in irregular fashion with grey cottages and houses. In this land of stone you sigh for the cheerful sight of a red-brick building or a glowing tiled roof; but the stone used is grey, and where the roofs are not of a cold blue slate, they are of a thatch held on by ropes that are heavily weighted. The place is still primitive. Until recently the nearest baker lived at Delabole, and to judge by the prizes (instead of cakes) on view in his window, he must have been the king of pastry cooks. In Cornwall, however, the housewife still bakes her own bread and is in other ways more self-sufficing, and let us add more thrifty, than elsewhere.
Arthur
"Who Arthur was," says Milton, "and whether any such person reigned in Britain hath been doubted heretofore and may again with good reason." We must remember that the traditions concerning him were not reduced to writing until centuries after his death, while Gildas, who was born according to his own account in what would be Arthur's lifetime, does not mention him.
The legends, however, assert that he was born at Tintagel Castle about 499 a.d., that he had three wives, but no children, and that his second wife, Yenifer (Guinevere), was buried with him at Glastonbury. Against the probability of this is the fact that Tintagel is not mentioned in Domesday and that its ruins are of the thirteenth century with later additions. It is quite likely, however, that the place, which is strongly situated on a jutting headland—the so-called Island—was fortified from time immemorial. It may originally have been one of those pathetic cliff castles, may have been improved on and made habitable by the conquering race of that epoch, and may eventually have fallen into decay.
The Castle
The present ruins are said to represent a castle built some little time after the Norman Conquest, a castle which speedily fell out of repair, for it had to be restored by Richard, King of the Romans, brother of Henry III., before he could entertain his nephew, David, Prince of Wales, here in 1245.
When Cornwall, till then an earldom, was made a duchy (1337) and bestowed on the Black Prince, a boy seven years old, all the castles were again fallen into decay. At Tintagel the timber had even been removed from the great hall "because the walls were ruinous." The main part of the building appears to have been on the Island, but it was connected with outworks on the shore by a drawbridge. Sir Richard Grenville, who made an official survey in 1583, tells us that this drawbridge, which had been in existence within living memory, was gone, its supports having been washed away by the waves. The sea having continued its work of destruction, the space is now too wide for any drawbridge to span, and in spite of a handrail the little climb to the "Island" ruins is a dizzy one. Nor is there much to see. Some of the masonry is recent, while the tiny chapel and altar are of about the same date as the later parts of the castle, but the view is fine. It makes up for the disappointment in Tintagel as a castle, for the disappointment of finding that here is no certain tradition of Arthur, that the very people feel about him much as Milton did. He may have been born here, this may have been his very castle of Dindraithon, but if so they know nothing of it. Arthur is a thing of books, of art, not life, of the Morte, the Idylls, and—best of all perhaps—of Clemence Housman's wonderful story "Sir Aglovaine de Galis," but he has no place in present-day folklore.
On the top of the mainland outworks is a doorway which in an eerie manner opens upon space, and a sheer drop of many hundreds of feet. It shows how much the sea is encroaching. Once upon a time this probably led to the look-out tower. Now the very foundations of that tower are gone and presently the masonry will go too, and the waters will roar unhindered between the mainland and the island.
The Beach and Barras Head
Far below is a tiny dark beach, the colour of which is explained when having climbed down a wooden stairway clamped to the rock—the only means of approach—it is found to consist entirely of rounded pieces of slate. They are of all weights and sizes, but there is no sand, no shells, nothing but slate. Opposite the Castle rock is Barras Head, and there at last the big modern hotel can be ignored and the wanderer lie out on the short, dry turf with the long line of hazy coast to either hand and, before him, the islands white with sea-birds and pink with thrift and the boundless stretch of sunlit waters.