TRISTAN AND ISEULT

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 47, Issue 2665, 3 September 1937, Page 3

TRISTAN AND ISEULT

EXCAVATIONS IN CORNWALL

DISCOVERIES AT CASTLE DORE Recently, while singers at Covent Garden were reviving the love story of Iseult, the beloved of Sir Tristan, excavators were digging down to the foundations of Castle Dore, near the Fowey estuary in Cornwall, in the hope of rediscovering the castle of King Mark, Iseult’s father.

Castle Dore is an earthwork about 400 feet above the sea and consists of a single bank and ditch, before which is a semi-circular defence work, with an entrance way. It is just the sort of place which ancient Britons would have chosen if they feared attacks from sea-raiders. The first settlers were certainly in occupation before Roman times (say, 200'8.C.), as the pottery resembles that found in the pre-Roman iron age lake settlements at Glastonbury.

Perhaps 150 people lived in Castle Dore in those days, but the settlement was abandoned soon after the Roman occupation, and again in the fifth century, when the Angles and Saxons were threatening the coasts of England.

The third settlement, dating from the sixth or seventh centuries, is the interesting one. At the time Castle Dore was occupied by a Cornish princeling whose name has been revealed by an inscribed stone, still to be seen near Fowey Town. The writing is in Latin and commemorates the son of Cunomorus, who is clearly the Marcus Cunomorus of later saintly legend, and who has been identified with the King Mark of the Iseult legend. Main Hall Revealed. The excavations at Castle Dore reveal the main hall of the prince’s house, and show that it was a wooden building, covering 80 ft. by 36 ft. It was supported by wooden pillars in three or four parallel rows. That is to say, it was based upon a Roman model, but was of wood and not of stone, and therefore rather like the great hall built by Hrothgar, King of the Spear Danes, which is described in “Beowulf.”

One can picture the tallest and straightest of the trees in. the neighbouring forest being felled to support King Mark’s hall. When it was completed Iseult’s father sat opposite the great central fire, and about him sat the warriors who engaged in that last grim fight about the deathbed of Tristan, and perchance listened later to the early versions of the ministrel’s song, which later made up the Tristan lay.

The Tintagel excavations, which are also in Cornwall, threw no light upon life in King Arthur’s age, largely because the place was later occupied by a, monastery. Indeed, the association of King Arthur with Tintagel may well be a late monkish invention.

Castle Dore is thus the first site giving definite knowledge of the Cornish civilisation after the departure of the Roman legionaries and before the expansion of Saxon rule over the whole west of England. It is a tiny settlement compared with the wonderful Maiden Castle, near Dorchester, in Dorset, which is yielding so much information about the pre-history age in Britain, but in archaeology every little helps.