[Illustration: _Photo: R. Webber, Boscastle_]
Tintagel must have been even more impressive a scene a few centuries ago than it is to-day, despite its wild sublimity in ruin. One more witness of old time may be called forth to give his evidence of what it was before the walls had been so buffeted and brought so low.
“A statelye and impregnable seate,” is Norden’s testimony, “now rent and rugged by force of time and tempests; her ruines testifye her pristine worth, the view whereof, and due observation of her situation, shape, and condition in all partes, may move commiseration that such a statelye pile should perish for want of honourable presence. Nature hath fortified, and art dyd once beautifie it, in such sorte as it leaveth unto this age wonder and imitation.” Tintagel is to be visited rather than described, though our most luxuriant poets have painted it with lavish richness of words, and artists have depicted some of its natural beauties in the most radiant of colours. From many a rocky verge can be seen the dark remnants of Arthur’s fortress, inaccessible on all sides but one; from the deep base the ocean spreads out without bound, surging and boiling and casting up steam-like fountains of hissing foam. Only a few arches and rude flights of steps, surmounted by a frail-looking wooden door, now remain, with some fallen walls which imperfectly outline the shape of what were once spacious royal chambers. On a carpet of turf wander the small mountain sheep, and pick their way about the narrow precipitous paths which wind around the jagged sides of the cliffs. The fortifications are in ruin, and the battlemented walls which encompassed the massive steeps are now nothing but disconnected strips over which the curious traveller looks into the angry waters grinding and regurgitating far below. The noble bridge which once stretched across the yawning chasm dividing the two promontories must alone be imagined, though its beginnings on each side may be traced by the line of low stone arches reaching, and stopping abruptly at, the edge. The hills “that first see bared the morning’s breast,” the heights “the sun last yearns to from the west,” as Swinburne has sung, are eternal, but Arthur’s castle has gone, and Tintagel, “half in sea and high on land, a crown of towers,” is even called by the dwellers no more by its old inspiring name.