The journey to Tintagel

"Tintagel.  Black cliffs and caves and storm and wind, but I weather it out and take my ten miles a day walks in my weather-proofs."  Alfred, Lord Tennyson,   25th August 1860

Tintagel Castle   Wiilliam Trost Richards, a Philadelphia artist, who visited in 1878  (wikimedia, et.al.)

Many families will be making for the Cornish coast this weekend, searching for sandy beaches, rock pools, ice creams, Cornish pasties and exhilarating cliff walks (preferably in sunshine).

Alfred, Lord Tennyson visited Cornwall many times, finding inspiration there for his great Arthurian suite of poems, The Idylls of the King, with its tales of King Arthur's court, based at Tintagel, according to the legend.

Edryn travels to King Arthur's Court   Gustav Dore engraving for Idylls of the King 1868

It was some ninety years later that our family first made the long journey down to Cornwall.  Maybe Tennyson would have visited Stonehenge - where we could just park by the road then and cross the meadow to touch the stones in awe and wonder. 

Victorian visitors at Stonehenge 

 He would know that Queen Victoria expressly wore Honiton lace on her wedding dress to support the  local industry, where we smiled at "Ye Olde Honitone Lace Shoppe":

Queen Victoria in her Wedding Dress (of 1840)  Anniversary portrait by Franz X. Winterhalter 1847

and perhaps he was also kept awake on his journey by town clocks striking every quarter all night long, as we once were at Okehampton.

In late August, we climbed the tortuous path to Tintagel's ancient ruins, returning decades later with my own young children, too nervous for their safety on the precipitous slopes to enjoy it fully, but the mystique of the ancient site and its spectacular views remains. A new footbridge now links the two parts of the headland, and excavations have unearthed ancient slates, one with a mysterious Latin inscription: "Artignou father of a descendant of Coll has had (this) made".  (see english heritage.org.uk)

And when I think of Tintagel's cliffs and the seas around it,  I am reminded of Tennyson's 1851 poem The Eagle:

"Ring'd in the azure world he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls,

He watches from his mountain walls

And like a thunderbolt he falls."

Tintagel, the birthplace of King Arthur     William Trost Richards

August beginnings: "A faire field ful of folke fond I there between "*

  Animas, Hidalgo County, New Mexico  (Hidalgocounty.org wikimedia)

"When they came south out of Grant county Boyd was not much more than a baby and the newly formed county they'd named Hidalgo was little older than the child.  In the country they'd quit lay the bones of a sister and the bones of his maternal grandmother. The new country was rich and wild. You could ride clear to Mexico and not strike a cross fence.  He carried Boyd before him in the bow of the saddle and named to him features of the landscape and birds and animals in both spanish and english.  In the new house they slept in the room off the kitchen and he would lie awake at night and listen to his brother's breathing in the dark and he would whisper half aloud to him as he slept his plans for them and the life they would have.

One winter's night in that first year he woke to hear wolves in the low hills to the west of the house and he knew that they would be coming on to the plain in the new snow to run the antelope in the moonlight.  He pulled the breeches off the footboard of the bed and got his shirt and his blanketlined ducking coat and got his boots from under the bed and went out to the kitchen and dressed in the dark by the faint warmth of the stove and held the boot to the window light to pair them left and right and pulled them on and rose and went to the kitchen door and stepped out and closed the door behind him."

The Crossing,  Cormac McCarthy 1994

Most of the key elements of this novel are here in the beginning paragraphs, the characters of Billy Parham and his brother Boyd, the landscape, the details of a spare practical daily life, of youth and loss.  This was a country where men needed to work with nature.

Mexican Grey Wolf,   National Wildlife Refuge Society, New Mexico

Billy was then still a child, but  "an hour later he was crouched in the dry creek bed where he knew the wolves had been using by their tracks in the sand of the washes, by their tracks in the snow... ..They were running on the plain  harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire."

He makes three crossings into Mexico, the first alone aged sixteen, to set free in the Sierra de la Madera mountains a wounded shewolf he has captured in a trap; people help him despite themselves.  "People hear about me givin first aid to a damn wolf I won't be able to live in this county." 

 All through this first journey, his youth and dogged integrity sustains him through hardship and danger, and he meets much kindness.

On his second crossing into Mexico Billy goes with his younger brother Boyd, after their parents are killed by Indians, determined  to find the family's stolen horses.   In this wild border country, the teenagers meet danger from nature and from men, hardship and evil, but most people they meet on their travels, despite extreme poverty, share what they have with the brothers.

The Chihuahua Desert, Mexico  (wikimedia)

Boyd finds a girl and stays in Mexico, leaving his brother, while Billy goes home to the States to enlist for WWII, but is rejected.  In his final border crossing many years later, a widely travelled and much older Billy, now a homeless solitary man, returns to Mexico to find his brother's grave and bring his body back to Animas.

South of Animas,  Hidalgocounty.org

"He slept that night in his own country and he had a dream wherein he saw God's pilgrims labouring…When he woke in the round darkness about, he thought that something had indeed passed in the desert night and he was awake a long time but he had no sense that it would ever return again."

 The border today: "The soul of Mexico is very old, said Quijada.  Whoever claims to know it is either a liar or a fool. Or both."

[All quotations from The Crossing,  Vol. 2 of the Border trilogy © Cormac McCarthy]

* Piers Plowman, William Langland's medieval allegory: "Of alle manner of men, the mene and the riche, Working and wandring as the world asketh."