TEVTAGEL

CORNWALL

A fake medieval castle on the island of Tmtagel misled archeologists for a long time into thinking that this could not possibly have been the site of King Arthur’s castle. But legend is insistent that Tintagel is where Arthur was bom.

Geoftfey of Monmouth visited Tmtagel between 1120 and 1130, and he viewed it as an Arthurian site—before the medieval castle we now see on the site was built by Richard, Earl of Cornwall. The idea of the site as a castle must therefore have come to Geoiirey from some literary or oral source. He describes “the town of Tmtagel, a place of great safety,” but when he visited it there were no stmctures to see at all. The small, rectangular huts that existed there in the sixth century would not have been visible in the twelfth century.

Excavation in the 1930s seemed to show lots of small houses and huts, and they were interpreted as a monastic settlement. Now they have been reinterpreted as a seasonal settlement for a band of warriors. The presence of very high-status pottery shows that it was a royal focus.

Tintagel was the place where a king of Dumnonia came for his coronation and on the highest point of Tmtagel Island there is a slab of bedrock with a footprint carved into it.

When you stand with your left foot in the footprint, you face the shallow saddle crossing the island, where the war-band’s bivouac tents were clustered. Turning through 180 degrees, you find yourself looking just a church-length to the east of Tmtagel church. To either side, several miles of the north Cornish coast can be seen. It is easy to imagine an induction ceremony here, in which a new king planted his foot symbolically into the living rock of his dead father’s kingdom, made gestures of command, and uttered an oath of service to the whole of Tricurium—the small local kingdom that was in view from that place. We can imagine the warriors of the war-band standing on the lower ground among the flapping tent-skins of their bivouac, watching awe-struck as the heir silhouetted against the southern sky by the sun became their king.

King Arthur’s Footprint, as it was already known in the nineteenth century, is not an isolated feature. An even more sharply defined, carved footprint, of almost exactly the same length, was cut in the bedrock on a knoll at Dunadd, the royal stronghold of the kings of Dal Riada. It too was probably used for the inauguration of Celtic kings. So, Tmtagel may not have been the place where Arthur was bom, but it was probably the place where he became king.