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A West Country Pilgrimage, a non-fiction book by Eden Phillpotts |
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Tintagel |
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_ Ragged curtains of castellated stone climb up the northern side of a promontory and stretch their worn and fretted grey across the sea and sky. They are pierced with a Norman door, and beyond them there spreads a blue sea to the horizon; above it shines a summer sky, against whose blue and silver the ruin sparkles brightly. Beneath, a little bay opens, and the dark cliffs about it are fringed with foam; while beyond, "by Bude and Bos," the grand coastline is flung out hugely, cliff on cliff and ness on ness, until Hartland lies like a cloud on the sea and little Lundy peeps above the waters. Direct sunshine penetrates the haze from point to point, now bringing this headland out from among its neighbours, now accentuating the rocky islands, or flashing on some sea-bird's wing. Shadow, too, plays its own sleight; the cliff that was sun-kissed fades and glooms, while the scarps and planes before shaded, shine out again and spread their splendour along the sea. Light and darkness race over the waves also, and now the fringes of foam flash far off in the sunshine and streak the distant bases of earth; now they are no more seen, when the cloud shadows dim their whiteness and spread purple on the blue. A ewe and her lamb come through the gateway in the castle wall. They share the green slopes with me and browse along together. Overhead the gulls glide and a robber gull chases a jackdaw, who carries a lump of bread or fat in his beak. The gull presses hard upon the smaller bird, and Jack at last, after many a turn and twist, drops his treasure. Whereupon the gull dives downward and catches it in mid-air before it has fallen a dozen yards. The flora on these crags is interesting, though of little diversity. Familiar grasses there are, with plantain and sheep's sorrel, the silene and cushion pink, the pennywort and blue jasione, the lotus and eye-bright; but unsleeping winds from the west affect them as altitude dwarfs the alpines, and these things, though perfect and healthy and fair to see, are reduced to exquisite miniatures, where they nestle in the crannies of the rocks and flash their pink and white, or blue and gold, against the grey and orange lichens that wash the stones with colour and climb the ruin in the midst. In sheltered nooks the foxglove nods, but he, too, is dwarfed, yet seems to win a solid splendour of bells and intensity of tint from his environment. Other castle fragments there are--scattered here and on the neighbour cliff to the east; but they are of small account--no more than the stumps of vanished ramparts and walls. Even so, they stood before any word was printed concerning them, or pictures made. An ancient etching of more than two hundred years old shows that their fragments were then as now, and only doubtful tradition furnishes the historian with any data. But the castle is perched on a noble crag, whose strata of marble and slate and silver quartz slope from east to west downward until they round into sea-worn bosses and dip under the blue. The story of gigantic upheavals is written here, and the weathered rocks are cleft and serrated and full of wonderful convolutions for dawn and dusk to play upon. Here more wild flowers find foothold, and the wild bird makes her home. The cliffs are crested with samphire, and the white umbels of the carrot; they are brushed with the pale lemon of anthyllis, and the starry whiteness of the campion; they are honeycombed beneath by caverns, where the sea growls on calm days and thunders in time of storm. Westward of the mount, guarding the only spot where boat can land from these perilous waters, a fragment of the ruin still holds up above the little bay, within bow-shot of any adventurous bark that would brave a landing. Here is all that is left of the last castle on this famous headland. Of the so-called "Arthurian" localities, the most interesting and richest in tradition is that of North Cornwall, and at its centre lie these ancient strongholds. In addition to the Castle of Tintagel one finds King Arthur's Hall and Hunting Seat, his bed and his cups and saucers, his tomb and his grave. It is a long and intricate story, and none may say what fragment of reality homes behind the accumulated masses of myth and legend. With the bards of the sixth century and those that followed them we find the English beginnings of Arthur and his celebration as a first-class fighting man. Then it would seem he disappeared for a while, and takes no place, either in history or romance, until the ninth century. In 858, however, one Nennius, a Briton, made a history of the hero, some three centuries after his supposed death in 542. The "magnanimous Arthur" of Nennius fought against the Saxons, and, amid many more noble than himself, was twelve times chosen commander of his race. The Britons, we learn, conquered as often as he led them to war; and in his final and mightiest battle--that of Badon Hill--we are to believe that 940 of the enemy fell by Arthur's hand alone--a Homeric achievement, unassisted save by the watching Lord. Thereafter his activities ranged over other of the Arthurian theatres and campaigns before he died at Camlan. But alas for song! From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Tennyson, that last prodigious battle on the Camel has been the joy of poetry, and the mighty adventure between Arthur and Mordred has been told and retold a thousand times; yet if those warriors ever did meet, it was certainly in Scotland, and not Cornwall, that the encounter took place. Camlan is Camelon in the Valley of the Forth, and here a tolerably safe tradition tells that the King of the Picts, with his Scots and Saxons, defeated the Britons and slew their King. Leland reported to Henry VII. that "This castle hath been a marvellous strong fortress and almost situ in loco inexpugnabile, especially from the dungeon that is on a great and terrabil crag environed with the se, but having a drawbridge from the residue of the castel on to it. Shepe now feed within the dungeon." That Arthur was begotten at Tintagel we may please to believe; but that he died far from the land of his birth seems sure. As for the existing ruin, it springs from that of the castle which saw the meeting of Arthur's parents, Uther Pendragon and the fair Igraine; but the original British building has long since vanished, and the present remains, dating from the Norman Conquest, did not rise until six hundred years later than the hero's death. An old Cornish tradition declares that Arthur's mighty spirit passed into a Cornish chough, and in the guise of that beautiful crow with the scarlet beak, still haunts the ruins of his birthplace. _ |
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