Crackington Haven and Tintagel, Saturday, June 6, 2026
The Coombe Barton Inn has very thick walls and very sound windows; we didn’t know whether the weather had lived up to the forecast, but the forecast was scary: rain most of the day with winds between 40 and 55 mph. We went downstairs for our usual hearty breakfast and had a long conversation with the lovely owner of the hostelry. She was born in Bosnia but left right after the war with Serbia…in which her father was murdered. She came to London to study, married a Brit, worked in fashion buying on Bond Street, and decamped to Cornwall because they didn’t want to raise their daughter in London.
Sticking our heads out the door made it clear that we weren’t walking today: it was far too dangerous to be on the cliffs in this wind. We did walk down to the beach, buffeted at every step by a gale coming off the water.
We retreated back into the inn and spent a pleasant hour in conversation as we waited for the bus to arrive. The inn had been a farm before it had been a rather grand home. These are the farm’s original outbuildings, including the milking shed on the lower left. The central parts of the inn, built of the fieldstone you see here, are more than three hundred years old.
Embedded in the wall of the inn is this local lyric.
On a day like today, with wind chills in the lower 40’s, it is hard to remember that parts of Cornwall are semi-tropical. But they are.
Here we are sheltering from the wind at the bus stop! Rory would clearly rather be anywhere else on earth.
Once on the bus, we learned that we had made a good decision. There was an Englishman aboard, a veteran walker who eats twenty mile of path a day; he had started south from Bude early that morning but encountered a Coast Guard official in Widemouth Bay who urged him—and everyone else—in the strongest possible terms not to walk the coast path.
The bus deposited us on the main street of Tintagel, one of the most heavily touristed places in Cornwall. Why? Because it has been associated with the magical birth of King Arthur ever since the appearance in 1136 of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. The central elements of the Camelot story are already present in his text: the king Uther Pendragon falls in love with Igerna, the wife of his ally Gorlois of Cornwall; he lies with her through the magic of the magician Merlin and Arthur is conceived. Arthur marries a noblewoman named Guinevere. Later in the same century, the Arthurian romances of the French author Chrétien de Troyes added Lancelot, his seduction of Guinevere, the Knights of the Round Table, and the quest for the Holy Grail.
There may well have been a Briton king in the post-Roman world with a name like Arthur, but there is absolutely no evidence that such an Arthur had anything to do with Cornwall.
There are some remnants of the charming Cornish village that Tintagel probably was. The old post office is now a museum administered by the National Trust.
It was bitter cold in the wind, and we dove into the first pub we saw, the King Arthur’s Arms. Small world category: the manager grew up in Scotsdale, AZ! He married a British woman whom he met in Chicago; they had a child and vacationed for three years running Cornwall; the third year they didn’t go home! Most of us had nice cream teas, while a couple of others were served gargantuan ham sandwiches.
For reasons that will become clear, the greater part of Tintagel Castle was closed today. But we headed down a steep path toward the water and the castle to see what we could see. It turned out that we could see quite a lot.
There had been a large Celtic settlement on this headland between the fifth and seventh centuries, with structures impressive enough to suggest the residence of a Cornish king. In 1233, Earl Richard of Cornwall, younger brother of King Henry III, built a proper medieval castle on the remains of the older fortress (Richard, who rebelled against his brother three times, was elected King of Germany in 1257). What you see on the upper left in the photo above is the fortified gatehouse of Richard’s castle.
As we climbed up to the gatehouse the wind met us with full force.
We were essentially on a high cliff above the sea, with spectacular views downward. In medieval times, one entered Richard’s castle here and then followed a land bridge across to the main structures on a point high above the ocean. This is a fanciful reconstruction of the castle; but it gives a sense of the land bridge.
By 1400, the land bridge had disappeared, the victim of erosion and landslips. The remains of the main castle are now on an island.
And to reach the island, you now cross a suspension bridge.
This is why the main castle was closed: with today’s wind, it would have been suicidal to cross that bridge! We made our way down to the water; the raging wind was causing swells out as far as we could see.
The Arthurian legends regained popularity in the nineteenth century; Tintagel became a place of pilgrimage associated with the British monarchy, which had always claimed descent from Arthur to underline its legitimacy. Alfred, Lord Tennyson visited Tintagel before writing his wildly popular Idylls of the King, a retelling of the Arthurian romance. It was Tennyson who named the cave on the left below Merlin’s Cave.
Back in Tintagel, we headed for our lodging, the Tintagel Arms. Despite its name, this turned out not to be a pub, but just a series of rooms with very odd hours. Reception was open only 3:30 to 5:30; we had tried to drop some gear when we arrived at noon and had been treated rather brusquely. Now, during “regulation’ hours, the manager tried to greet us with unusual charm. The rooms are very, very basic. As Patti said, it was like being back in college.
We had a nice dinner at The Old Malthouse down the Main Street; pretty standard fare but done well enough. We were treated, though, to a procession of diners coming down the stairs in formal robes. When asked what was going on, we learned that it was the annual meeting of an Arthurian society. It takes all kinds.
