Tintagel Castle

Tintagel Castle has a long association with legends related to King Arthur. A late medieval fortification was built on the site by Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall, in the 13th century. Still, in the 1930s, excavations revealed a much earlier high-status settlement with links to the Mediterranean during the Late Roman period.

In the 12th century, Geoffrey of Monmouth mentioned Tintagel as the place of Arthur’s conception in Historia Regum Britanniae, a fictionalized British history account. Archaeologists believe that Tintagel was an elite settlement inhabited by Dumnonian royalty and their entourage in the early medieval period. Artifacts found on the site point to Tintagel as a site where ships docked to deposit their cargo from southern Europe in the early medieval period – each ship carrying six or seven hundred amphorae!

Already famous because of Arthur’s legends and seen as the traditional place for Cornish kings, Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall traded the land of Merthen for Tintagel Castle and built an old-fashioned-looking castle for the time to make it appear more ancient. The castle became slowly dilapidated after Richard, used first as a prison and later as a pasture and generally damaged from the erosion of the isthmus that joined it to the mainland.