Echoes in a Hollow Space

Here's the remaining pictures of our day at Tintagel.

Once you've made the climb to the top, there are some interesting ruins, but the vistas—oh, the vistas are spectacular. On the very top of Tintagel there isn't much but bluebells (in spring) and the bare outlines of castle ruins. So why have I always said this one of the highlights of the trip for me? I suspect endorphins played their part, but really—Tintagel is about those incredible vistas and the dramatic coastline all around it on all sides; it's about the romance of what once was there; and the even bigger romance of what might have once been there. It's a mystical kind of place for all that, and if you're any kind of an Arthurian, it's a must see.

To see the entire new batch, CLICK HERE.






This is the shore opposite Tintagel. You can see some of the sea caves that are prevalent in this stretch of coastline.

I promised mnfaure that I'd post the rest of my "panoramas" of Cornwall, but I thought Tintagel required some explanation. Or maybe I just think it does and wanted an excuse to blab. Either way. Four years later, this is still one of the high points of the trip for me. A beautiful, rugged landscape and a beautiful release of endorphins.

Be warned: there are more photos behind the cut then are indicated by the labels.

We visited towards the end of our week there, and as may be evident from the pictures, it was a chilly spring day—although most of the weather we'd had in Cornwall up until then had been sunny and beautiful. It was actually perfect weather for visiting Tintagel, I think, which is quite a romantic and dramatic site. Plus, it's a sodding great climb to get onto the "island." I wouldn't like to do that in hot weather. As you'll be able to see in...

( Panorama #1. )

( Panorama #2. )

( Panorama #3. )

( Panorama #4. )

I just posted more photos of The Trip [old link no longer works: GO HERE.], some more of our day on the moors in Cornwall visiting the ancient stuff. Of course that's got me reminiscing. That was a jam-packed day. And lots of German speakers on the road, for some reason. We ran into the same group repeatedly, all apparently doing "the megalithic thing."

We started off at Chysauster, the 2000 year old village, then went to St. Grada and Madron Holy Well. Next up was Lanyon Quoit and Men-an-Tol out on the moors, lunch and "arting" around at the galleries and shops in St. Just, wandering lost through hedgerows in search of Carn Euny (another ancient village), zipping across Slaughter Bridge and "Hey, I think that was something significant" but the road was way too narrow to turn around in and by the time we found someplace, we decided we'd had enough and headed back to our hotel in Marazion (and dinner). Actually, all this stuff was within about a ten mile radius so even though we saw a lot it was mostly a ramble rather than a rigid schedule. But the stuff that day was so intense, so groovy, it does kind of feel like we visited them on separate days.

I've dealt with our adventures at Chysauster here, and St. Madron's rhapsody waxing here, so I won't inflict that on you again. Lanyon Quoit, one of those ancient megaliths, was really cool because it's just out in the middle of a field beside the road. You pull over, climb over a stile, and there you go. Massive stones holding up another massive stone slab, about six feet tall I guess, and there's nothing but rugged moorland all around. This area was one of the few places in Cornwall that looked like I'd pictured it in my mind's eye. I was thinking Hound of the Baskervilles whenever I pictured Cornwall, but it's mostly rolling green hills and the sea. Though I guess there are parts, deeper inside Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor that are more rugged and quite dramatic.

What we saw was beautiful, just not what I expected—and it didn't take long for us to get tired of quaint little seaside villages. How jaded that sounds, but...seen one, seen 'em all, basically. And that's where the tourists hang, so they tended to be more crowded. The things we saw on this trip that stayed with us (and I'm not just talking for myself here) were all inland, away from the tourist rim. Well, okay, the little village of Tintagel was pretty touristy (and by the sea), but that was different. There was the tourist part—the Merlin’s Cave Inns and the King Arthur Lounges and the like—then there was the real part where you had to do some serious climbing and communing with nature. That last bit was totally exhilarating. As I rhapsodically waxed here.

After Lanyon Quoit we went in search of Men-an-Tol. Funny thing about M-A-T. I'd been seeing pictures of it for years. In fact, a picture much like this. These pictures always gave the impression of a sweeping, impressive monument—gigantic in scale and mind-blowing thinking of how the ancients engineered it and erected it. Well, I'm here to tell you, Men-an-Tol is seriously lacking in the sweeping department. In fact, whoever took this picture had to be laying on their belly to get this perspective. M-A-T is a wee bit of a monument, a dinker, no more than waist high. And we walked miles to get to it! All right, maybe it was only a half mile or so, but it felt much longer. Even longer on the way back because bathroom issues were added to the mix. (I swear, these kinds of circumstances are the only ones in which I have penis envy.)

So, back in the car with bladders taken care of, we decided we were starving and meandered towards St. Just for lunch. This is a lovely village out in the middle of the moors which has seen quite an influx of artists and artisans. It hasn't been discovered in a big way like St. Ives and doesn't have seaside vistas, so it was actually rather pleasant. The folks were friendly, the arts less touristified, but more importantly—they had really good coffee , tea, and chow. We wandered into one arty store where I managed to drop a bundle of cash. I didn't spend much on this trip, but I think I spent about a third of my entire knickknack budget there. We also struck up a conversation with the cute, funny young man minding the store. He had a lot of keen observations about the local sights. He wanted to know which part of the States we were from because his wife came from New York. "From that big island there. I can't remember what it's called." "Long Island?" we suggested. "No, that doesn't sound familiar. It's that really big island there." After much hemming around he finally remember the name of the big island: Manhattan.

Afterwards, we wandered down to the bakery because we had our eyes on some brownies we'd glanced in the window. We struck up a conversation with the nice lady behind the counter who seemed very local to us, with a real Cornish accent. She also wanted to know what part of the States we were from. Turned out she was from New York. "Oh, are you married to the young man down at the shop?" "Him? No, he's married to my niece." She'd lived in St. Just twenty years and had become quite local after meeting (in New York) and marrying a young Englishman, who introduced the niece to his buddy, who..."Love is a many splendored thing," as the lady at the bakery said.

We tried to follow the directions to Carn Euny given to us by the nice young man, really we did. Everyone agreed that it's one of the more interesting ancient sites around, and you can actually go down into the fogou there, unlike Chysauster. But it had rained heavily the day before, see. And the road leading to Carn Euny was wide enough for our van, but all muddy and rutted and it looked like one would need a tank to traverse without getting stuck. And I think the site was three or four miles up that road and we'd already done so much walking! It was getting on towards late afternoon and we'd eaten too much, okay? We decided not to. I've regretted not going up there since, but what are you going to do? I don't think vacations should be endurance tests, frankly. We were tired and bilious. Some of the Germans were heartier, though. They parked their van and took off hiking up the muddy, rutted road. We felt shame and hung our heads, then leaped gleefully back in the van and drove away.

I think we decided to look for a church along the way, maybe Sancreed, or maybe it was when we were driving up and down the road looking for the minimal signage pointing to Carn Euny, but we zipped across a little bridge and I noticed a sign saying, "Slaughter Bridge." It rang a bell, but I couldn't place it until we were back in Marazion and I was looking through my Green Guide. It turned out to be a legendary Arthurian site, one of the gazillion places in the British Isles claimed to be the place where Arthur fought his last battle, Camlann. As legend has it, A & His Boys fought here and managed to hold off the enemy and keep them from crossing the river Camel. Now, this was not such an imposing bridge, nor was the river much more than a wide stream. In fact, I could have probably stood in the deepest part of that river and still been nearly as tall as the top of the bridge. (Although I will admit we drove rather quickly over it and my memory has hazed a bit in the last four months.) Taking into account that I would have been tall by Medieval standards (at 5'7"), I'm still hard-pressed to see anyone being stopped at this bridge when they could so easily walk around it to get to the other side. Unless the river was a roaring cataract in those days, but in that case they would have needed a much bigger bridge.

Then I remembered Men-an-Tol and a possible answer came to mind. Maybe the ancient Cornish simply suffered from a severe lack of proportion. It would explain so much.

Forgive me: I'm still processing this trip and it's probably going to keep spilling over here.

Someone asked what the high point of my trip was. There were so many things that made such an impact, but I suppose if pressed I’d say the most impressive was Tintagel. The place is breathtaking, even if you don't buy into the Arthurian associations—and I'm not sure I do, although recent excavations there have produced tantalizing clues that seem to support some Arthurian-era associations.

Tintagel village is a little place, heavily influenced these days by the New Age shops, although they haven't gone completely mad with it, thank God, and it still retains some of its village feel. To get to the "castle" (13th century ruins), you have to first go down a long, steep path into a kind of seaside gorge. You can go even further down to the actual rugged beach itself with its spectacular sea-carved caves lining the cliffs, but that's a pretty strenuous climb down then back up and you'd better be prepared to get there early in the day and eat your Wheaties if you want to do both the cliffs and the castle. We wanted to see the Castle and then decide about the rest, so we turned away from the sea path and headed towards the "island" on which the castle sits. Once we'd climbed up, then down from the castle we were too tired to climb down (then back up) from the beach. Hell, we were too tired to make that steep climb back out of the gorge. We decided to say, "Screw pride" and pay the enterprising man with the Land Rover to drive us back up again.

Actually, the island is a big hunk of rock once linked to the headland by a narrow land bridge. The top of the land bridge has eroded away but the National Trust folks have erected a metal bridge for folks to cross over it. It's a steady uphill climb to get to the bridge and the day we were there was moody, gray skies, threatening rain, the wind blowing strong and cold, the sea pounding against the black rocks of the cliffs below and sending up giant spumes. Crikey! The genuine Daphne du Maurier atmospheric Cornwall experience. Perfect!

Once you've wheezed over the bridge (also an upward climb) you still have to scramble up the cliff face to get to the top of the island and the castle. I'm talking very steep steps, chipped out of the rock and then lined with slate—nearly vertical in some places. Okay, okay, okay, so there's a very sturdy, multi-layered handrail, but you do feel rather out there on the cliffs. We had to stop for many "photo ops" along the way—our running joke whenever we were seriously out of breath, begun when I actually faked photo ops earlier in the trip so no one would see how winded I was getting going up the steep hill at Chysauster. I actually raised the camera to my face for fake pictures, but later confessed what I'd done to much hilarity. (Fortunately, we scrambled up so many hills, et al., on this trip that by Tintagel I was in pretty good wind--but it was a challenge for all of us.) Was it worth the climb? You betcha.

On the island there are really layers of ruins, from 5th century Dark Age foundations, to 9th century monastic ruins, overlaid with the ruins of the 13th century castle. Apparently Richard, Earl of Cornwall, built a castle there as a show piece because even by his day the Arthurian associations at Tintagel were well known. Whenever he had important visitors, he'd send out a legion of workers a week in advance to the castle at Tintagel to bring in all the luxurious furnishings and what-not and then take people out there to show off. As soon as the visitors left, he'd remove all the good stuff and leave a small cadre of guards behind to look after the place most of the year. It was just too windswept and dramatic for a full-time presence.

And that, more than the ruins, is what makes Tintagel a magic place. Breathtaking—not just from the climb, but from the views along the coastline--black and gold slate rock topped by bright green turf, pounding surf, angry white-capped sea, gulls screaming and gyring. It's just one of those places that makes you vibrate with the raw power of nature. It made me feel insignificant while at the same time making me feel part of the continuum of nature and of the ancestors who struggled to survive in such places. It really did strip away a lot of the modern pretensions because I realized, looking at that untamed coast, that no matter what man builds up, nature has the last word. We can build our show castles, but in some places, it's a constant fight just to stay even.

Oh yeah, we have a tendency as a species to try to conquer nature, but we rarely succeed at that long-term. We can destroy a place, change it utterly to suit our short-term needs, but ultimately . . . the rust never sleeps. What was there may not come back again the way it was once we've laid our heavy hand on it, but something else will come along that we have to fight against. A place like Tintagel reminds me, if I need it, that humankind is not divorced from nature. We sometimes have the illusion that we are, but nature always has the last word. We can't survive in a world we've destroyed anymore than any other endangered species.

And speaking of places destroyed . . .

Low Point: Bath. When I visited it fifteen years ago, I really liked the place. It was a graceful, beautiful, historic city with loads of interesting things, a lovely river, well-maintained. When I visited it this time, I was distressed by the heavy invasion of American-Internationalist stores everywhere: The Gap, Starbuck's, Orvis, etc. Store after store cramming those once-graceful streets, making it like any ol' mall anywhere. I mean, I can understand the residents wanting to be part of the modern world, not wanting to live in a museum, but I think they've lost something precious along the way. I spent two days in Bath on the last trip. This trip I couldn't wait to get out of town and realized I would probably never go back again.

Fortunately, most of the things I was interested in for this trip are not heavy tourist destinations. Oh yeah, Stonehenge and Avebury. But they've managed those places really well, not let the rapacious internationalist conglomerates take over. The National Trust has kept commercialism very much to the minimum, very discreet, and I was happy to see that these sites (which I also visited fifteen years ago) had not changed much. Avebury is still the coolest because you can go right up to the stones and lay hands on them and it was a thrill, even though we were marching around them in a pouring rain. And Stonehenge…well, what you've heard is true. They seem smaller when you first get there, it's crawling with tourists. But again, they've managed it well and although you can't walk amongst the actual stones, you can get quite close to them and walk all around them. You can manage a genuine Stonehenge experience (if you keep an open mind and lowered expectations) and it can still be a mighty impressive place.

My biggest disappointment regarding Stonehenge is due to the weird, near-dissociative experience I was having in all the places I revisited from the previous trip. It was like I was seeing it through two different windows in time, having trouble sometimes jibing old with new. The first time I saw Stonehenge it was autumn, past the tourist season, and I remember driving through the undulating landscape approaching it, cresting a low hill—and there it was right by the roadside, stark and dramatic against a blue-gray sky. You still do come over a crest and see it, but they've planted a coppice of trees in the middle distance, so the dramatic effect of Stonehenge against the sky has been smudged and diminished.

Everything changes, nothing remains the same. You can't step in the same river twice. Or the same Stonehenge.

Oh, and on a writing note: I received a reply from Anna Genoese at Tor on my novel in only two weeks. =:0 The letter was waiting for me when I got home. She passed on it, but she wrote me a very encouraging personal note. She loved the title, loved the setting, thought I'd done an interesting take on vampires, but the characters didn't captivate. However, she did say she'd love (her word) to see my next work. So I'm consigning this rejection to the plus column—and really, I'm not at all upset about the rejection. No, I'm not putting a brave face on things, I'm not in denial. I truly didn't think this novel was up to snuff, but I promised myself that I'd give it one last shot (I've sent it out numerous times) and if AG passed I'd move on to other things. Like my next work, my just-completed novel, the one I may well send to her when I've got it polished up.