Page:Cornwall (Salmon).djvu/279

 TINTAGEL the Picts, and unfriendly or rebellious British ; that he had learnt much from Roman civili- sation, and something from Christianity ; that he died possibly at Camelford, more prob- ably at Camelon in Scotland ; all this we may accept without much misgiving. Those who doubt the King's existence have to face a vast amount of tradition, much certainly fabulous, but some most difficult to explain away. One powerful evidence is the immense number of Arthurian place-names ; we find them wherever Brythonic traditions extended, in Cornwall, Wales, Brittany and Strathclyde. Says Dr. Dickinson {King Arthur in Cornzcali, 1900), " Next to the devil in bestowing names on localities comes Arthur ". We meet his name from Land's End to Edinburgh. It is quite probable that his story was revived of set purpose, and sufficiently cooked-up, as a means of shedding glory on the Celts in their struggle with Teutonism ; but behind all fiction there must, in such a case as this, be an underlying reality. Of the history of the present ruins not much is known. The castle was an early residence of the Earls of Cornwall. It afterwards went to the Crown, but again relapsed to the duchy. There was a drawbridge, now gone. Leland, writing three and a half centuries since, says : "The residue of the buildings of the castle be sore wetherbeten, and yn ruine ; but it hath been a large thinge ". We cannot expect to find it less weather-beaten now. On the 239