In Search of Merlin

It's Friday 9 August 1996 and the last day of our Cornwall holiday. We walked into Newquay for the final shopathon. Not too bad as we set out early so we were on our own. My nephew had a sore throat and his parents have decided to find a doctor. I asked him if he felt ill or had a headache or anything and he said "No," and certainly didn't look ill. I would have just bought some lozenges or something and rather thought the doctor, if they managed to find one that could see him that day, would turn them round swiftly... Gill and Steve had arranged to go tenpin bowling with John that afternoon so Fran and I drove on to Tintagel for the afternoon alone.

We drove north to Tintagel. This is the Old Post Office. It dates from the 1300s and was the post office of the village of Trevena, the old name of the village. Tintagel is a name first seen in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae written in 1136 which gives a fanciful history of Britain, starting with its colonisation by the Trojans after their defeat at Troy and then bringing in King Arthur and Merlin and setting the castle here where Uther Pendragon was disguised as Queen Igraine's husband and was thus able to lie with her, conceiving the baby Arthur. The castle incidentally would have been less than a hundred years old when Geoffrey was writing. The legends of Arthur are set some 600 years earlier...

Anyway, the post office started to call itself Tintagel Post Office sometime in the 1800s, a name that previously only referred to the headland and castle ruin. The name stuck... All the shops there sell swords called Excalibur and I even saw some morning stars in one shop - an absolutely horrible weapon from medieval times. It's a spiked metal ball on the end of a chain which is attached to a handle. They were used to either brain somebody (armour made little difference if a blow from one of these landed) or the chain would allow a strike at a shield and the chain would then whip the spiked ball behind the shield's rim to smash the hand of the person carrying it. Can't understand how they are allowed to sell them.

The town is a half mile from the cliffs and beach, which are reached either by a walk down (and back up) a reasonably steep and not exactly smooth dirt track or by bumping up and down the same track in the back of a Land Rover shuttle. Legend has it that this is where King Arthur was born, being handed over to Merlin the wizard for raising in secret. The castle on top of the hill looks every bit the part - but was built a good few centuries after Arthur would have lived. An early Christian settlement or trading post was there before it. I wrote my own (even more fanciful) book about King Arthur, still available here for Kindle books, and stuck to the early monastery idea with the caves beneath the cliffs being Merlin's home.

The caves at low tide can be reached easily and explored. We walked down, but if I was hoping to take photos from inside the caves - and I most certainly was - then I was to be disappointed. The tide was in and you definitely would be risking your life trying to wade into a cave that was flooded. The sea rushes into the small cove with quite a force.

I took this photograph in 1987 and ever since had been hoping to reproduce it in colour. This cave went all the way through from the cove, under the castle and the sea had broken through from a cave on the next cove so that you could walk through from one side to another. I'm not sure whether in the years since then, the cave had collapsed at one point. It was spectacular as you can easily see in this photograph. In my book (mentioned above and very reasonably priced for discerning readers...) I had a series of tunnels under the rock where Merlin lived.

Certainly damage had been done recently. In the foreground a worker is repairing damage where the stream that runs down the gorge throws itself off the cliff face and falls to the beach below.

I think that locally it is one of these caves on the northern side of the bay that is known as Merlin's Cave. So in order to get around this in the book I imagined the whole cove as being cliffs which at some point are collapsed and destroyed by the sea (or by enemy magical spells) But AHEM! no (more) spoilers! We had a ride back up the very steep hill in the back of the Land Rover shuttle. I was crushed next to a very pretty girl in very short shorts. Miss Franny was crushed next to me on the other side - sometimes you just have to make sacrifices...

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