Part 5

But the castle is perched on a noble crag, whose strata of marble and slate and silver quartz slope from east to west downward until they round into sea-worn bosses and dip under the blue. The story of gigantic upheavals is written here, and the weathered rocks are cleft and serrated and full of wonderful convolutions for dawn and dusk to play upon. Here more wild flowers find foothold, and the wild bird makes her home. The cliffs are crested with samphire, and the white umbels of the carrot; they are brushed with the pale lemon of anthyllis, and the starry whiteness of the campion; they are honeycombed beneath by caverns, where the sea growls on calm days and thunders in time of storm.

Westward of the mount, guarding the only spot where boat can land from these perilous waters, a fragment of the ruin still holds up above the little bay, within bow-shot of any adventurous bark that would brave a landing.

Here is all that is left of the last castle on this famous headland. Of the so-called "Arthurian" localities, the most interesting and richest in tradition is that of North Cornwall, and at its centre lie these ancient strongholds. In addition to the Castle of Tintagel one finds King Arthur's Hall and Hunting Seat, his bed and his cups and saucers, his tomb and his grave.

It is a long and intricate story, and none may say what fragment of reality homes behind the accumulated masses of myth and legend. With the bards of the sixth century and those that followed them we find the English beginnings of Arthur and his celebration as a first-class fighting man. Then it would seem he disappeared for a while, and takes no place, either in history or romance, until the ninth century. In 858, however, one Nennius, a Briton, made a history of the hero, some three centuries after his supposed death in 542. The "magnanimous Arthur" of Nennius fought against the Saxons, and, amid many more noble than himself, was twelve times chosen commander of his race. The Britons, we learn, conquered as often as he led them to war; and in his final and mightiest battle--that of Badon Hill--we are to believe that 940 of the enemy fell by Arthur's hand alone--a Homeric achievement, unassisted save by the watching Lord. Thereafter his activities ranged over other of the Arthurian theatres and campaigns before he died at Camlan.

But alas for song! From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Tennyson, that last prodigious battle on the Camel has been the joy of poetry, and the mighty adventure between Arthur and Mordred has been told and retold a thousand times; yet if those warriors ever did meet, it was certainly in Scotland, and not Cornwall, that the encounter took place. Camlan is Camelon in the Valley of the Forth, and here a tolerably safe tradition tells that the King of the Picts, with his Scots and Saxons, defeated the Britons and slew their King.

Leland reported to Henry VII. that "This castle hath been a marvellous strong fortress and almost _situ in loco_ inexpugnabile, especially from the dungeon that is on a great and terrabil crag environed with the se, but having a drawbridge from the residue of the castel on to it. Shepe now feed within the dungeon."

That Arthur was begotten at Tintagel we may please to believe; but that he died far from the land of his birth seems sure.

As for the existing ruin, it springs from that of the castle which saw the meeting of Arthur's parents, Uther Pendragon and the fair Igraine; but the original British building has long since vanished, and the present remains, dating from the Norman Conquest, did not rise until six hundred years later than the hero's death. An old Cornish tradition declares that Arthur's mighty spirit passed into a Cornish chough, and in the guise of that beautiful crow with the scarlet beak, still haunts the ruins of his birthplace.

A CORNISH CROSS

Kerning corn waved to the walls of the little churchyard and spread a golden foreground for the squat grey mass of the church that rose behind it. The building stood out brightly, ringed with oak and sycamore, and the turrets of the tower barely surmounted the foliage wrapped about it. Rayed in summer green the trees encircled church and burying-ground with shade so dense that the sun could scarce throw a gleam upon the graves. They lay close and girdled the building with mounds of grass and slabs of slate and marble. The dripping of the trees had stained the stones and cushions of moss flourished upon them. Here was the life of the hamlet written in customary records of triumphant age, failures of youth, death of children--all huddled together with that implicit pathos of dates that every churchyard holds.

But more ancient than any recorded grave, more venerable than the church itself, a granite cross ascended among the tombs. Centuries had weathered the stone so that every angle of its rounded head and four-sided shaft was softened. Time had wrought on the granite mass, as well as man, and fingering the relic through the ages, had blurred every line of the form, set grey lichens on the little head of the Christ that hung there and splashed the shaft with living russet and silver and jade-green. The old cross rose nine feet high, its simple form clothed in a harmony of colours beautiful and delicate. The arms were filled with a carved figure of primitive type and a carmine vegetation washed the rough surfaces and outlined the human shape set in its small tunic stiffly there. Green moss covered the head of the cross and incised patterns decorated its sides to within a foot or two of the grass by a churchyard path from which it sprang.

The design was of great distinction and I stood before one of the finest monuments in Cornwall. On the north side ran a zigzag; while to the south a more elaborate key-pattern was struck into the stone--a design of triangles enfolding each other. The back held the outline of a square filled with a cross and a shut semicircle carved beneath; while upon the face, under the head which contained the figure, there occurred another square with a cross. The shaft upon this side was adorned with the outline of a tall jug, or ewer, from which sprang the conventional symbol for a lily flower.

There was another detail upon the southern side which seemed to lift this aged stone back into the mists of a past still more remote, for there, just above the ground, might be read the fragment of an inscription in debased Latin capitals. They were no longer decipherable save for the solitary word "FILIUS" which was easily to be distinguished, and this fragment of an obliterated inscription spoke concerning a period earlier by centuries than the carving and decoration. Indeed it indicated that the memorial was a palimpsest--a pre-Christian pillar-stone transformed at a later age to its present significance.

There are above three hundred old crosses still standing in Cornwall, and not a few of these, dating from time beyond the Roman period, originally marked the burying-places of the pagan dead. At a later period, long after their original erection, they were mutilated. But the greater number of these grand stones belong to Christianity, and by their varied decorations the age of them may approximately be learned.

Some bear the _Chi Rho_ monogram, which stands for the first two letters of the Greek "Christos," and these belong to the seventh century; but the more numerous appear to date from that later period when the sacred figure of the Christ began to be substituted in religious architecture for the symbolic lamb that always preceded it. The Eastern Church authorised this innovation, after A.D. 683, and pronounced that "The Lamb of Christ, our Lord, be set up in human shape on images henceforth, instead of the Lamb formerly used." The earliest type is not particularly human, however, and the little, archaic, shirted doll of Byzantine pattern, which ornaments so many of these Cornish crosses, has not much save archaeological interest to commend it. Until Gothic times this was the conventional pattern, and it is assumed that these early crucifixes dated from the eighth century and onward until a more naturalistic figure began to appear.

Scattered over the far-flung landscape of the West our Cornish crosses stand; by meadow and tilth and copse, among the little hamlets of the peninsula, in lonely heaths and waste places overrun by wild growing things, they shall be found. Sometimes the Atlantic is their background and sometimes the waters of the Channel. They were set on the roads that led to the churches, and served not only as places for prayer, but also as sign-posts on the church-ways. Now many of the more splendid specimens have been rescued, as in the case of this great cross, and stand in churchyards, or under the shadow of sanctified buildings. Their fragments are also scattered over the land, here set in walls, here at cross-roads, now as a gate-post, or a stepping-stone, or foot-bridge. Sometimes they serve for boundary stones, and are yearly beaten; occasionally they support a sundial; not seldom the Ordnance Surveyors have outraged them with bench marks. Often only the stunted head and limbs of the wheel-crosses remain, their shafts vanished forever; still more frequently the cross-bases or pedestals alone have been chronicled and the stones that surmounted them exist no longer. None can say how numerous they were of old time; and it may happen, while many have been destroyed past recovery or restoration, that others still exist in obscure places, or sheltered by the saving earth, for a future race of antiquaries to discover and reclaim.

End of Project Gutenberg's A West Country Pilgrimage, by Eden Phillpots