Big Ideas Child in a Million Extraordinary Children Extraordinary People
Greatest Ever Interesting Documentaries Multiple Sclerosis RICL Stranger than Fiction
Planet Dinosaur Origins of Us Orbit Frozen Planet

---

Britain AD: King Arthur’s Britain

At Tintagel, on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall, there is a rugged promontory. This dramatic site has long been associated with the Dark Age warrior, King Arthur. I think this is one of the most romantic places in Britain. And I’m not surprised that Arthur is supposed to have been conceived in a castle here. The trouble is, those dramatic ruins are 13th-century and have nothing whatsoever to do with Arthur or with Camelot.

King Arthur first became associated with Tintagel when the author Jeffrey of Monmouth wrote a version of a legend in which King Arthur is born here.

The Earl of Cornwall decided to build an Arthurian-style castle on the headland.

Tourists have been coming here ever since to catch a glimpse of Camelot. However, the Dark Age story of Tintagel is far more exciting.

Excavations have shed new light on Britain’s ancient contacts with the rest of the world. Charles Thomas explains.

Charles Thomas “This is the classic way to see it, to approach it. We’ve got the island, that neck. You can see most of the important parts. You can see the summit there.”

Site Navigation

Britain AD Arthur’s Camelot Witham Valley Fishbourne Palace Chichester Harbour Chedworth Villa Gnosticism Post-Roman Pottery Wroxeter Crag Lough Tintagel British Exports Caldey Monastery Anglo-Saxon Myth DNA Survey Shore Forts Yorkshire Wolds Isotope Analysis Linguistics Venerable Bede British Identity

---

Search Site

Charles Thomas “In the early 1980s, there was a fairly dramatic fire here. The whole of the top of the plateau caught fire. The grass burnt, even the roots. They then had a unique opportunity to examine two or three acres. The top was covered with the remains of footings of little huts. 20 or 30 rectilinear buildings. The thought that these were all mediaeval. We now know their post-Roman. We’ve investigated 10% of the top of the island. We found the pottery were still recognisable as post-Roman imported pottery. Something had been taking place at the top on a big scale.”

At the very location where writers imagined a Dark Age King being born, modern archaeology had found the remains of a large settlement, dated to the middle of the Dark Ages. And this was not all. Trampled amongst the remains of the buildings where thousands of shards of intriguing pottery.

Charles Thomas “The finds are extraordinary, because there were large quantities of wheel-made pottery. None was the same as we get in Roman Britain. And none of it could conceivably have been produced here in post-Roman times.”

Archaeologists thought the pottery looked Mediterranean in origin. To be certain, they had it analysed by David Williams at Southampton University.

David Williams “What I did with colleagues is to make a thin section of part of the actual pot, stick it on to a glass slide and grind it down so it’s terribly thin. When you put it under the microscope, you can see the minerals and rock fragments in the clay of the vessel, and they will actually reflect what type of geological area the clay came from.”

So if I look through this at that slide in there… Lots of white bits and three pinky things, yeah.

David Williams “That’s serpentine. That isn’t a common mineral at all. You do get examples of serpentine in the Mediterranean, in western Cyprus and they also occur just across the coast in southern Turkey. There’s a whole string of kilns around there. When we compared it with the Tintagel pottery, it’s almost a dead ringer.”

David discovered that the Tintagel pottery had been made in one of a series of enormous kiln sites in southern Turkey. So much pottery was produced here that is still lies in huge piles by the side of the road today.

David Williams “These are thick, sturdy vessels that were made for the buffeting of sea transportation. They were very heavy indeed.”

These heavy-duty pots were used for transporting goods such as olive oil and wine around the Mediterranean. A ship that visited Tintagel may well have started from Turkey, perhaps pick up further cargoes, tableware, micaceous jars, across to the Peloponnese, the more amphorae, then took Carthage, were possibly it picked up North African Olive-oil amphorae, plus the African tablewares, then possibly through the Straits of Gibraltar to Tintagel.

David Williams “The big containers are really the Coca-Cola tins of their period. If these are at Tintagel, they don’t last forever. When some idiot drops it, it’s shattered. Even so, you can say this is a group of pottery from the Mediterranean which got here in some such period as 530 to 560.”