Before Camelot and the Round Table, there was Tintagel. This now-ruined island fortress, first built during the fifth and seventh centuries, is a castle of two halves. It straddles the north Cornwall mainland and “the island of Tyntagel” or headland, whose causeway disappeared between the 14th and 17th centuries. The fortress’s two parts are now connected by a spectacular new 70-metre long footbridge, high above the sea, that was opened by English Heritage in 2019.
Although there’s some evidence of Roman occupation, it was in about AD500 that Tintagel really prospered. A community grew up, trading tin with the Mediterranean world, and fragments of pottery and extensive ruins suggest that this was an intensive period of occupation. For some unexplained reason, activity seems to have suddenly died out and, for the next 500 years, the headland was abandoned to the elements.
