Our next tour stop was the very scenic Tintagel Castle ruins. Legend holds that Tintagel Island in Cornwall where the ruins lie was the site of King Arthur's conception. Tintagel is also featured in the 12th century Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde wherein the knight Tristan is sent to escort the fair Isolde from Ireland to Cornwall to marry his uncle King Marc of Cornwall. En route to Cornwall, they ingest a love potion, and fall in love with each other. Isolde ends up marrying the King, but she and Tristan use all manner of trickery to carry on an affair while maintaining an illusion of innocence.
A castle was built in Tintagel by King Henry III's brother, Earl Richard of Cornwall, in 1233. The Earl probably wanted to tap into the mystique of the Arthurian legend, and perhaps even more so the story of Tristan and Isolde given it was still a popular story at the time of Earl Richard. The ruins themselves are across a footbridge that you can see above Derek. It was a beautiful setting.
We started our tour by going down below and exploring along where the streams go out into the ocean.
The kids enjoyed jumping into the surf.
We wandered along the edge of the cliffs.
At the base of the cliffs is Merlin's Cave named for the wizard from Arthurian legends. At low tide, you can walk through it (it's a tunnel, though the hole in the opposite side is considerably smaller than the main entrance here). At high tide, it is all underwater.
This waterfall sent the water from the stream down to the beach and out to the ocean.
There are stairs to get up to the ruins from the beach (or vice versa) visible in the lower right of this picture. We had great weather that day, so the beautiful scenery really popped.
Up at the top where the castle ruins lie is this wall with a doorway that opens into the courtyard where we are standing. This is a spot often used for photos because of the striking scenery outside the doorway. I think the doorway is a reconstruction from much more recent times rather than original.
A great spot for a family portrait.
This wall and window is more original to the 13th century (and an indication of how much of the ruins looked).
We found other beautiful spots as we walked around the castle ruins.
This seagull was fearless and posed with us while nibbling cracker crumbs from Derek and Lydia.
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I felt like I was on top of the world.
Tintagel Castle has a statue of King Arthur as a warlord who had defended England from the invaders. I pledged my loyalty to him.
Lydia along one of the castle courtyard walls.
Lydia found a shallow rock overhang along the cliff.
This island was so photogenic.
We then drove to visit Pendennis Castle. This castle was built by Henry VIII in the 1540s as a defensive fortress to guard against France, the Holy Roman Empire and to keep the waterway for the River Fal protected.
The entrance to Pendennis Castle over a dried up moat.
The castle was ideally situated for defensive purposes as it was refitted with guns for both World War I and World War II. This tunnel underneath the Pendennis Castle grounds leads out to a battery of guns. The guns were designed to protect the nearby town of Falmouth from German E-boats. Falmouth was one of the main launching points for D-Day, the allied invasion of Normandy, France just across the English channel in World War II.
The monitoring stations have been restored to as they were during WWII. We could look out at ships in the channel and imagine they were German or British naval ships, and then call in coordinates as needed to the gunners.
Our home base for this section of our road trip was the beach town of St. Ives. The kids loved the rental townhome we stayed at there. I enjoyed it too other than the constant squawking of seagulls outside our windows and driving the tiny narrow streets to get in or out (including a section where we had to drive through a mixed use pedestrian/car open plaza/road and keep hoping that people would slide out of the way as we inched forward). When we got back from our castle exploration that day, we headed down to one of the lovely beaches.
Derek particularly enjoyed "being awesome" and "epic" as he jumped in the waves.
Here's Derek after a long day of being epic waiting to rinse his shoes off from beach sand before we let him into the house. Looking out our front door into the inner courtyard/parking area of this cluster of townhomes gives a sense what our accommodations were like here.
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