On a cold, windy winter’s day, standing among the 13th-century remains of one of Britain’s most famous castles, you can see why Tintagel has inspired poets, artists and storytellers over the centuries.
Looking at the crumbling, toothy remains of the walls, it is easy to imagine a time when people dined in splendour in the great feasting hall. King Arthur, thanks to some help from Merlin’s magic, is said to have been conceived on this spot. It was this that seems to have inspired Richard, Earl of Cornwall to build the castle in the first place. But now the future of Tintagel is in question.
“You’ve got the cliffs being eroded, and a chunk fell down on to the beach this winter, from the big storms,” says English Heritage property curator Win Scutt, pointing to a spot a few metres above the sandy cove of Tintagel Haven, which lies below the castle. “That is now undermining an old Victorian wall. You can see that it’s now slightly hollow under that wall.”
English Heritage is so concerned about the escalating effects of the climate crisis that it launched a fundraising appeal in summer 2022, highlighting six of its sites it considers most vulnerable to coastal erosion. As well as Tintagel, Bayard’s Cove Fort in Dartmouth and the Garrison Walls in St Mary’s, the largest of the Isles of Scilly.
Coastal erosion is nothing new. The impressive – and recently award winning – new bridge that connects the mainland to the remains of the castle is a good example of modern architecture rising to meet the challenge of many years of erosion.
In the middle ages, Tintagel’s residents walked from one side of the site to the other using a narrow land bridge as high as the clifftops. But the crossing was worn away between the 14th and 17th centuries, leaving the castle divided by a natural chasm that had to be crossed using steep steps. The new bridge was built in 2019.
The rapidly increasing pace of change is now concerning experts up and down the country, not only from English Heritage but also the National Trust and Historic Environment Scotland, among others. Sea levels are predicted to rise by up to a metre in some places by the end of the century, compared with just 14cm along the southern coast of England in the 20th century. And as the wintry weather once again takes hold, that threat becomes more real.
Over on the castle side of the bridge, a more recent victim of weather erosion is immediately evident. One part of the walls that would have surrounded the medieval banqueting hall is leaning precariously to one side and is cordoned off to prevent people standing under it.
“These standing remains are being etched away by the change in weather,” says Scutt. “There’s a kind of muddy mortar between the stones, and this is disappearing. These would once have been covered with front and back stones but they have been stolen over time, which is not good news for the remains. It’s like losing the enamel on your teeth.”
English Heritage is all too familiar with how quickly coastal erosion can wreak havoc, thanks to a recent and devastating event. In Hampshire, 160 miles east of Tintagel, lies Hurst castle. In 1541, Henry VIII ordered its construction to protect the coast from enemy attack. It survived, intact, through the civil war, the Napoleonic wars and two world wars.
It was a different type of foe that caused one of the fort’s walls to fall dramatically into the waves. Over time, the sea has washed away the shingle on which the castle rests, allowing water into the foundations. This led to a gradual structural failure which, after particularly violent storms in the winter of 2021, resulted in the collapse of part of the east wall.
“Some of my team were on site and saw it happen,” says Rob Woodside, estates director at English Heritage. “They were fortunately nowhere near the area of collapse but they saw it. They said it just went with a massive bang and a cloud of dust, and they jumped out of their skins.”
The castle has since been added to the World Monuments Fund watchlist, and the work being done now to try to prevent future collapse will be used as an example for other countries facing similar challenges from erosion.
Eight hundred miles north, on the Orkney islands in Scotland, another battle for preservation is taking place but over a very different historical structure. There, archaeologists are looking at ways to preserve the Neolithic village of Skara Brae, which lies near the white beach of the Bay of Skaill on the west side of the islands.
The site is one of the best-preserved neolithic settlements in north-western Europe and attracts tourists from all over the world. It consists of a collection of prehistoric, circular houses, built from slabs of stone with stone furniture inside.
“By the 1920s, there were very significant erosion problems at that site,” says Mairi Davies, climate policy manager at Historic Environment Scotland. “At that point, a sea defence was built at the site. That is still there but there are significant issues with erosion that is now effectively undermining that structure.”
Although the wall continues to be refortified, Davies and her team are now looking at options that go beyond hard defences: “These were very much thought of as being the response to coastal erosion in the past, but we are now looking at the potential for nature-based solutions.” These include things like ‘beach recharging’, where you move huge volumes of sand from one point along the coastline to another weaker point. “That way, you do a really good job of protecting the coastline more generally, and because of that protecting the cultural heritage as well,” says Davies.
A more radical solution is to completely move an archaeological site to a safer spot. This happened on the isle of Sanday in the Orkneys in 2014, when archaeologists and the local community physically moved the site of a bronze age “burnt mound” – these are believed to have been saunas or sweat lodges – to a spot further inland after serious storms upped the pace of erosion.
Physically moving a heritage site is not going to be a solution in the vast majority of cases of erosion, admits Davies, but if you have a community which is very engaged and feels very strongly about it, it can work, she says.
There is also the possibility of restoring a castle or heritage structure to how it would have been – but this can be a hard one to get past people who are often attached to the romantic idea of ruins.
“Some castles were originally rendered and painted white,” says Scutt. “If we could persuade the public to understand what some castles were originally like, we could do something with that. Not at Tintagel, but I can think of other sites where it would be fantastic to be able to render those castles and limewash them.”
Like archaeologists and experts up and down the country, Scutt and his team will continue to discuss and enact various solutions to shore up the remains of our heritage. But regardless of experts’ best efforts, do we have to ultimately accept that some of the historic structures that have come to define Britain’s coastline will eventually be lost to the sea?
“A long-term perspective tells you loss is inevitable,” says John Darlington, executive director at World Monuments Fund Britain, which is working with English Heritage on Hurst castle. “What we do as heritage managers is primarily about the careful management of change. And that might be to hold the line, to shore up a bit of coast and to protect. It might be to offer soft solutions, like sand dune reclamation. And it might be, and increasingly probably will be, to manage ‘curated decay’.”
In other words, letting some structures slide – safely – into the waves may be the only solution. But Rob Woodside at English Heritage is optimistic: “Our sites are about England’s history and how places have changed, but also about how places keep going. We’re not ready to raise the white flag to lose our properties. But we are open to recognise the challenges we face, and how we need to work with others to plan for their future.”
