15 Facts About Tintagel

Tintagel or Trevena is a civil parish and village situated on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall, England.

The village and nearby Tintagel Castle are associated with the legends surrounding King Arthur and in recent times has become a tourist attraction.

Until then, 'Tintagel' had been restricted to the name of the headland and of the parish.

Tintagel was one of the 17 Antiqua maneria of the Duchy of Cornwall.

On 6 July 1979, Tintagel was briefly subject to national attention when an RAF Hawker Hunter fighter aircraft crashed into the village following an engine malfunction; the unusual incident caused significant damage and consternation, but no deaths.

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Excavations around Tintagel Castle have supported the notion of trade goods there, with ships from along the Atlantic Coast and the Mediterranean Sea bringing pots carrying wine or oil, in the Early medieval period.

Major excavations beginning with C A Ralegh Radford's work in the 1930s on and around the site of the 12th-century castle have revealed that Tintagel headland was the site of either a high status Celtic monastery or a princely fortress as well as trading settlement dating to the 5th and 6th centuries, in the period immediately following the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain.

Wesleyan Methodism in Tintagel began in 1807 at Trenale and over the next sixty years gained many adherents though divided among a number of sects : chapels were built at Trevena in 1838 and Bossiney in 1860.

St Paul's Church, Tintagel has a thirty-thousand piece mosaic of the saint within its walls.

The only slate quarries in Tintagel that remain operational are Trevillet and Trebarwith Road Rustic Quarry.

Coastline around Tintagel is significant because it is composed of old Devonian slate; about a mile southwards from Tintagel towards Treknow the coastline was quarried extensively for this hard-wearing roofing surface.

The beach at Bossiney Haven is close by and Trebarwith Strand, just half an hour's walk south of Tintagel, is one of Cornwall's finer beaches, boasting clear seas, golden sands, and superb surf.

Tintagel is used as a locus for the Arthurian mythos by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the poem Idylls of the King and Algernon Charles Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse, a literary version of the Tristan and Iseult legend.

From 1552 to 1832, Tintagel was a parliamentary borough sending two members to the House of Commons; these included Sir Francis Drake, Sir Simon Harcourt and James Stuart-Wortley, 1st Baron Wharncliffe.

Tintagel bought Trevena House as an occasional residence: it later became the front part of King Arthur's Hall.