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Tintagel () or Trevena (Cornish: Tre war Venydh, meaning Village on a Mountain) is a civil parish and village situated on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. The village and nearby Tintagel Castle are associated with the legends surrounding King Arthur and in recent times have become a tourist attraction. It was claimed by Geoffrey of Monmouth that the castle was an ancient residence of King Arthur. Tintagel is used by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the poem Idylls of the King and Algernon Charles Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse, and Thomas Hardy's The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse, is a play published in 1923, which perpetuates the same legend. Tourists can visit King Arthur's Great Halls at Trevena which is a substantial building of the early 1930s. The Artognou stone, which was discovered in 1998, has added to the legend, although historians do not believe the inscription refers to King Arthur. Toponymy Toponymists have had difficulty explaining the origin of 'Tintagel': the probability is that it is Norman French, as the Cornish of the 13th century would have lacked the soft 'g' ('i/j' in the earliest forms: see also Tintagel Castle). If it is Cornish then 'Dun' would mean Fort. Oliver Padel proposes 'Dun' '-tagell' meaning narrow place in his book on place names. There is a possible cognate in the Channel Islands named Tente d'Agel, but that still leaves the question subject to doubt.The name first occurs in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136, in Latin) as Tintagol, implying pronunciation with a hard [g] sound as in modern English girl. But in Layamon's Brut (MS Cotton Otho C.xi, f. 482), in early Middle English, the name is rendered as Tintaieol. The letter i in this spelling implies a soft consonant like modern English j; the second part of the name would be pronounced approximately as -ageul would be in modern French. An oft-quoted Celtic etymology in the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, accepts the view of Padel (1985) that the name is from Cornish *din meaning fort and *tagell meaning neck, throat, constriction, narrow (Celtic *dūn, "fort" = Irish dún, "fort", cf. Welsh dinas, "city"; *tagell = Welsh tagell, "gill, wattle"). The modern-day village of Tintagel was always known as Trevena (Cornish: Tre war Venydh) until the Post Office started using 'Tintagel' as the name in the mid-19th century. Until then, 'Tintagel' had been restricted to the name of the headland and of the parish. Area and population Treknow is the largest of the other settlements in the Tintagel parish, which also include Bossiney, Truas, Trebarwith, Tregatta, Trenale, Trethevy, Treven, Trevillet, and Trewarmett. The population of the entire parish was 1,725 at the 2021 census, and 1,727 at the 2011 census, down from 1,820 people at the 2001 census, and the area of the parish is 4,281 acres (17.32 km2). (The population recorded in the 2011 census was 1,782 but this includes Knightsmill in the parish of St Teath.) An electoral ward also exists extending inland to Otterham. The population of this ward at the same census was 3,990. History and government A small cliff castle was established at Bossiney in Norman times, probably before the Domesday Survey of 1086. In Domesday Book, there are certainly two manors in this parish (for a probable third see Trethevy). Bossiney and Trevena were established as a borough in 1253 by Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall. Bossiney (which included Trevena) was held from the monks of Bodmin by the Earl of Cornwall: there was land for six ploughs and 30 acres (120,000 m2) of pasture (before the Conquest it had been held from the monks by Alfwy). The monks of Bodmin held Treknow themselves: there was land for eight ploughs and 100 acres (400,000 m2) of pasture. Tintagel was one of the 17 Antiqua maneria of the Duchy of Cornwall. The parish feast traditionally celebrated at Tintagel was 19 October, the feast day of St Denys, patron of the chapel at Trevena (the proper date is 9 October but the feast has moved forward due to the calendar reform of 1752). The market hall and the site of the fair were near the chapel. "Tintagel (Trevena) declined towards the end of the medieval period for it was ill-equipped to take up fishing as an alternative occupation. Paradoxically it now enjoys a temporary prosperity as a result of tourist interest in the castle which was converted so romantically by Geoffrey of Monmouth into an ancient residence of King Arthur." (W. G. V. Balchin 1954)The Tithe Commissioners' survey was carried out in 1840–41 and recorded the area of the parish as 4,280 acres (17.3 km2), of which arable and pasture land was 3,200 acres (13 km2). The land owned by the largest landowner, Lord Wharncliffe, amounted to 1,814 acres (7.34 km2), and there was 125 acres (0.51 km2) of glebe land. Precise details of the size and tenure of every piece of land are given. Sidney Madge did research into the history of the parish and compiled a manuscript Records of Tintagel in 1945. The villages of Trevena and Bossiney were until the early 20th century separated by fields along Bossiney Road. Trebarwith was the scene of the shipwreck of the Sarah Anderson in 1886 (all on board perished), but the most famous of the wrecks happened on 20 December 1893, at Lye Rock when the barque Iota was driven against the cliff. The crew were able to get onto the rock and apart from a youth of 14 were saved by four men (three of these from Tintagel: one of them, Charles Hambly, received a Vellum testimonial and three medals for bravery afterwards). The story is told in verse in Musings on Tintagel and its Heroes by Joseph Brown, 1897; the youth was buried in Tintagel Churchyard and the grave is marked by a wooden cross (his name is given in the bureaucratic Italian usage, surname first: Catanese Domenico). On 6 July 1979, Tintagel was briefly subject to national attention when an RAF Hawker Hunter fighter aircraft crashed into the village following an engine malfunction; the unusual incident caused significant damage and consternation, but no deaths. The borough of Bossiney was given the right to send two MPs to Parliament c. 1552 and continued to do so until 1832 when its status as a borough was abolished. For the purposes of local government, Tintagel is currently a civil parish and councillors are elected every four years. The principal local authority in this area is Cornwall Council, but until March 2009 the parish was in the area of North Cornwall District Council. Parish council minutes can be found on Tintagel Web. From 1894 to 1974, the parish was in the Camelford Rural District. Arthurian legends As described in Geoffrey's popular Historia, Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, put his wife Igraine in Tintagol while he was at war (posuit eam in oppido Tintagol in littore maris: "he put her in the oppidum Tintagol on the shore of the sea"). Merlin disguised Uther Pendragon as Gorlois so that.... Discover the John Trevena popular books. Find the top 100 most popular John Trevena books.