ARTHUR LEGEND

Southland Times, Issue 25312, 15 June 1935, Page 9

ARTHUR LEGEND

TRADITION PUT TO TEST. EXCAVATIONS AT UNTAGEL. The Arthurian traditions of Tintagel have been put to the test of the spade. King Arthur’s Seat remains in. the realm of legend, but the excavators have found the early monastic buildings to which the existing Arthurian tales have been attached. Recently a lecture on Tintagel Castle and the Celtic Monastery now discovered was given in Burlington Hous6 before the Society of Antiquaries by Mr C. A. Ralegh Radford. Mr Radford, who has been in charge of the excavations made in the past two seasons by the Office of Works, to whom the Duchy of Cornwall has entrusted the guardianship of the site, said that until recently only fragmentry walls were yisible on either side of the gulf separating the “island” from the mainland. These were clearly mediaeval and could have no connection with King Arthur. But the mediaeval builders,.so he now found, used the earlier structures as a quarry, and the site of extensive and probably forgotten ruins may have caused the historic Geoffrey of Monmouth to associate the headland with one of the towns described in the Arthurian authorities. In the neighbourhood of the mediaeval chapel of the Castle an extensive settlement with four different building periods had come to light—a preNorman religious establishment, which seemed to have begun as a hermitage in the lifetime of St. Juliot (c. A.D. 500), the saint to whom the chapel was dedicated. This part of Cornwall came under Saxon rule during the first half of the ninth century, and the monastery was deserted. I