Miss Franny's Fabulous Fridge Magnets

The last time I showed some of Miss Franny's fridge magnet collection was way back in July. This time I show some of the UK places commemorated on the bits of plastic that disguise our fridge.

This one covers the entire county of Somerset and was bought this year when we spent a long weekend with friends near Wells.

Whilst I'm not going to put up photos of every place mentioned on it - actually there are some places we haven't been yet on it - I'll cover the top right and the one below it. We've been to Cheddar lots of times taking photos of the same unchanging scene every time. The thing that changes is the style of cars in the car parks, so... guess the year!

Weston-Super-Mare was a regular holiday destination place during my early teens. We first went in 1967 but it's a while since we stayed there. I think the last time I visited was in June 2004 whilst on the road for work and whilst it was a June evening, it was cold and dull so that I remember the weather more than the town.

This one is for a very specific place. The British Museum in London is a fascinating place to wander round and anyone with an interest in history and cultures will find time going very fast indeed when you are in there.

I remember it with the open courtyard, but for quite a while now it has been roofed with glass. This looks even more spectacular from outside provided you can view it from a vantage point such as the 17th floor of the Centre Point building.

The King Arthur magnet could have come from any corner of England, or from the centre of it. So many places claim to be the site of his birth, his battles, his city of Camelot...

I even wrote my own version a few years ago which is available for Kindle e-readers.

The fridge magnet came from Tintagel in Cornwall, where the famous castle remains are a few hundred years after the historical Arthur was supposed to have lived. Tintagel features in my book as the home of Merlin.

A 3D sculpted fridge magnet from the Prince Regent's opulent and exotic Royal Pavilion at Brighton. A real mix of styles it comes across as an Indian palace from outside and a Chinese one inside. Well worth a visit.

My photo was taken one night whilst I was travelling for work and due to run a workshop at Brighton University the following morning.

The Polperro fridge magnet shows the entire county of Cornwall and therefore makes finding Polperro quite hard unless you already know where it is!

It's one of my favourite places in the whole of England and despite the fact that it seldom changes, my camera always gets a thorough work-out when I'm there!

A look at foreign parts in the next article about Miss Franny's Fabulous Fridge Magnets!

Merlin's Cave

Tintagel is now forever linked with the legend of King Arthur. In the stories it is to the castle on top of the cliff that Merlin smuggles King Uther, disguised as the husband of Igraine so that Arthur can be conceived. And it is from here that the infant Arthur is delivered into Merlin's hands to be brought up away from the court, unknowing of his parentage until Uther's death is near.

So in 1987 when we visited I had to see the place.

The part of the legend that places these events at Tintagel Castle ignores the fact that at the time of Arthur (if he indeed ever existed) was the early 6th century. No Norman castle existed at the time because the Normans would not invade for another 500 years.

Anyway, the legend is now deep rooted. So in September 1987 when I was writing my own fantasy novel about Arthur, King And King To Be, (UK link / America/Canada link) I knew I had to include Tintagel.

There is a cave called Merlin's Cave here. On the opposite side of the bay to the castle. It fit my story better to use the smaller of the two caves shown above, just to the left of the water line.

In this case "small" is relative! The cave is huge! I've heard lots of reports over the years that this was in danger of collapse. In fact it does collapse in the book!

So I'm not sure if you can still go into the cave or not. In the book it's an entrance to the fairyland of Merlin and his elven daughter, Merienne.

In 1987 you could walk right through almost to the other side of the cliff. Perhaps you could walk through at low tide. When I visited the sea was already coming in from what was the rear of the cave for me. But what an atmosphere to the place! It inspired chapter four of my book.

I did not try to put a castle into Tintagel's part of my story though. There has been evidence found of a very early Christian settlement on the site, so I used that instead. And that's the end of any spoilers!

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...

Return to Cornwall 1996 Holiday Index

King Arthur's Round Table

Strange that only a week ago I mentioned King Arthur as yesterday I had an email from Switzerland, where there is to be an exhibition called King Arthur and his Knights from April through to October 2008. The exhibition is to be a joint venture between Schweizerisches Institut für Kinder- und Jugendmedien (the Swiss Institute for Children's and Youth Media) SIKJM and Museum Aargau and will be shown simultaneously in two venues: Castle Lenzburg and Castle Hallwyl in Kanton Argau, Switzerland.

The organisers wrote to me, asking to use the photograph shown here of the henge earthworks known as King Arthur's Round Table at Eamont Bridge near Penrith in Cumbria. It appears on my Stone Circles web page (using web space no longer available). I took the photograph on slide film in 1985 and over the 22 years of its existence I'm afraid it has attracted a great deal of dust and grime. Anyway I cleaned it up as best I could and sent the largest scan I could and for good measure sent some more recent photos taken in better weather which were a bit sharper.

We think of King Arthur and his knights as riding around in medieval armour, because the main stories about him were written (and the majority made up) some 600 or so years after he would have lived and they were a bit - how should I say - modernised by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to extol the virtues of 12th aristocracy. He introduced most of the characters that we associate with Arthur, including Merlin, Uther and Ygerne and even the associations with Tintagel and Avalon. A bit like historians of the future taking the film Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves as the basis for their understanding of 13th Century England...