Footnotes

by Peter Fiennes

  It wasn’t always this way. In 1806 someone opened a lead and silver mine nearby, down at the headland at the foot of Tintagel Castle. They called it ‘King Arthur’s Mine’ and although it probably wasn’t working in 1850 when Wilkie visited, it was up and running again a few years later. There were also quarries along the coast, sending slate out to sea from little Tintagel Cove, or bringing it inland for the local builders. This must be one of the reasons, I am thinking now, that the main tonal note of Tintagel is grey – slate, stone, and a sweeping hinterland of car parks – and, as the first squall of rain arrives from the north, I find myself succumbing to the kind of creeping dread that comes when you’re far from home on a cold night in a bleak town on a grim, dark headland. And you’ve just been insulted by a mug. I scuttle back to my B&B and lie on the lonely bed, feeling fairly sure that Ithell (and indeed Wilkie) would have found better ways to occupy themselves than watching Tom Cruise leap from tall buildings in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.

  The next day is bright and clear and I find I have misjudged Tintagel. The shops are no longer tawdry but enticing. The quartz rocks and amethyst rings are aglitter in the sunshine. A car races down the high street, stops outside the Cornwall Hospice Care charity shop and Bill Bailey leaps out and rushes inside (or a man who looks just like Bill Bailey, quite bald, but with a residual festoon of long hair flopping over the collar of his heavily fringed suede jacket). What can the hurry be? Two minutes later he’s back outside, clutching a vinyl record, and then he’s into his car and speeding out of town.

  I follow a footpath to the castle and walk through wet fields where the only sound is birdsong: the high notes of blackbirds, the drowsy purring of a wood pigeon and the raucous shouts of the crows. Wilkie doesn’t mention the Norman church near the cliffs at Tintagel, which is a shame, because it’s one of those places (or perhaps it’s just one of those moments) that are pregnant with holy otherness. The church is Norman, but with traces of its Saxon predecessor, and there’s an old woman inside, arranging bunches of daffodils, primroses, irises and other spring flowers near the font and up the nave and around the side chapel. If Wilkie were here (and who’s to say he’s not?) he’d call her a ‘peasant woman’ and ask her about the church and hand her a small tip before leaving, but I stay silent and we sidle round one another, the woman breathing heavily as she shuffles and distributes her flowers. There’s a memorial here to a fourteen-year-old cabin boy from the Italian barque Iota, which was ‘wrecked by a raging gale’ in December 1893 and, despite the heroic efforts of the local men, who saved the rest of the crew, the boy was drowned. You can hear the sea from here, a constant presence of menace and joy. A few half-remembered words of Larkin slip into my head, and I find myself loitering in this quietly serious place longer than I had intended.

  Philip Larkin’s fellow poet, John Betjeman, wrote with evocative force about the ruins of Tintagel Castle, which sits on an island just yards from the rocky coast, in his Shell Guide to Cornwall. ‘Let us all’, he exhorted, ‘save those with weak hearts and heads, dare the steep path which crosses from the mainland to the island.’ Ithell was also here, contemplating the ‘vertiginous view’ and crossing to view the remains. When Wilkie made the journey it was ‘by a steep and somewhat perilous path; so narrow in certain places, where it winds along the verge of the precipice, that a single false step would be certain destruction’. A couple of years earlier Tennyson must have made it over while researching Idylls of the King, judging by his notebook: ‘Rainy and bad, went and sat in Tintagel ruins, cliff black and red and yellow, weird looking thing.’ (It’s good to know that even the greatest poets falter in their descriptions sometimes.)

  The local National Trust man is initially keen to dispel any notion that the castle may have had anything to do with Arthur. The castle, he says, was Cornwall’s first holiday home, a medieval indulgence and never much used. But, he adds, digging is still taking place on the island, uncovering all sorts of intriguing evidence of the place being an important trading base, where some kind of local power, perhaps in the sixth century, dealt with Mediterranean merchants and Vikings. He’s clearly desperate to say the name, so I say it for him: ‘Arthur!’ Well, yes, maybe, he mutters, but in truth I’m just standing here killing time because I’m absolutely terrified of heights – it gets worse every year – and I can already see, peering through the ruined gatehouse, that the route to the island is more, much more, than I’ll be able to manage.

  It is the sight of a tour party of elderly Germans heading down the stone steps that persuades me to stop talking to the National Trust man and follow them to the island. They are soon far ahead, dancing across the narrow wooden bridge that spans the raging seas, and I inch after them, heart racing, one step at a time, hanging on to the fence with sweaty hands. Sometimes people want to pass me coming the other way, but there’s something in my eye that makes them all stay on the side of the path closest to the suicidal drop, leaving me to clutch and moan at the cliff face. At one point, after the bridge, I decide that I might as well spend the rest of my life here, halfway up the path to the island, or maybe I’ll just wait for a helicopter to winch me out (or drop food parcels), or perhaps that woman in high heels, who is now sauntering up the path with her dogs and two young children, can lift and coddle me to safety.

  I am so shaken by the time I reach the island that I can’t take in anything. I have books by Ithell Colquhoun, John Betjeman and Wilkie Collins jostling together in my bag, and I try and distract myself by imagining them all meeting for tea. But I’m also thinking, did Betjeman even come here? There’s something ambiguous in his writing (‘save those with weak hearts and heads’) – I bet the fat fraud never even went anywhere near Tintagel Castle. And Wilkie too – he seems to imagine there were ‘sheep cropping the fresh pasture, within the walls which once echoed to the sweetest songs, or rang to the clash of the stoutest swords of ancient England!’ No sheep could possibly live here. He dreamed that up in the pub.

  I totter towards the safe centre of the island, leaning into a wind that feels strong enough to fling me over the cliffs. And I am watching the people who have also made it to the island: toddlers, yes, but also geriatric women with sticks and immensely larded men and young couples strolling hand in hand, laughing and taking selfies at the crumbling cliff edge. The best thing, I am thinking, is to imagine a time beyond this moment, when I’m safely back on the mainland, possibly under a duvet, when all of a sudden – sweet Jesus! – the figure of DEATH appears out of a light mist, standing gaunt and terrible on a promontory on the far side of the island. Is there no one else here who can see him? I don’t dare ask. I look again and see that of course it’s not Death – it’s a tortured metal statue of Merlin, or maybe Arthur, with his hood and cloak and staff – and there are people even now walking around him and up to the very end of the island (step away from the edge you FOOLS!), but I’ve had enough. I’m heading back. They’re not so bad, those steps, if you do them sitting down.

  Wilkie was far braver than I am. For much of his life he was tormented by ill health, in particular crippling outbreaks of gout, and his eyes would often flare up agonizingly. Through his writing years he had to put up with some vicious reviews (and there were plenty, despite the raging success of The Woman in White); mockery in the press; his repeated failures as a dramatist (The Moonstone flopped and his 1882 tragedy, Rank and Riches, had the first-night crowd howling with unwanted laughter); and a tour of the US that was received with indifference and even walkouts (this was especially galling after Dickens’s predictably triumphant progress a few years earlier, but Wilkie’s readings were, by all accounts, limp). Of course Wilkie had his many successes. In 1863 one critic acclaimed him the ‘King of Inventors’. But above everything he was resilient and he burned with an unquenchable energy. Nothing, it seems, could staunch the flow of his words.

  Wilkie wrote Rambles Beyond Railways in a few weeks in the autumn of 1850. He could churn it out, just like Enid, although th
e inventiveness of his language never fails. From Tintagel, with their thoughts already on home, Wilkie and Henry headed for one last sight, the lonely waterfall of ‘Nighton’s Kieve’. (Wilkie’s mother had moved house while he was away on this jaunt, into a much grander place than he thought they needed or could afford, and he was anxious to get back; but he relented when he saw his new room and workspace.)

  The coastal path could not be lovelier on this gentle spring day, with a smell of fresh bracken and salt in the air. There are very few people about, but with my nerves shredded, I keep them cliff-side as we cross paths. Wilkie remarked on the extraordinary good humour of the Cornish people, even though, he said, they had a tendency to stare at strangers, and it’s true there’s an aura of goodwill, a cheery hello and piercing eye contact from everyone who passes. A small fishing boat chugs into an empty bay and anchors just offshore, where it bucks and turns in a mild but friskily insistent swell. I sit on a slab of granite to watch it for a while. In the early days of Tintagel Castle someone watching from this place, probably using this handy granite seat, would not have had a clue what might be about to appear next over the horizon: traders, raiders, slavers, invaders … and Wilkie would have imagined that this one boat was an outlier from the great Cornish fishing fleet, scouting for pilchards; and now, the boat just sits there, riding the waves for a few minutes, and then turns and disappears up the coast.

  A path by a busy stream leads inland towards Wilkie’s waterfall. There is no one on it. The water slips and fizzes over the rocks and at one point flows sideways into a low dark pool, fringed with reeds, trembling underneath an old hawthorn tree, still immersed in its winter slumber. With Wilkie on my mind (and, I suppose, his friend Millais), I half expect to see Ophelia here, floating on her back, with flowers spilling from her hands. I walk up to a place where two small streams meet, their waters skipping lightly over two large flat stones, the banks tumbling with primroses and a scattering of dandelions, and with an unexpected bounty of beetles crawling among these beautiful yellow and golden flowers. A seagull gives me an old-fashioned look from a nearby rock. My head, of late, has been so filled with what has gone wrong with our natural world – and our inability to halt the onrush of destruction – or even agree our part in it, let alone what needs to be done – that I am unprepared for this surge of life, the hum of ancient magic in this enchanted valley. It feels like a place before humans. There’s peace here, and a lively insistence that the world will carry on. Of course, we humans are here. We are everywhere. There’s a vapour trail in the sky and a scrappy wire fence at the top of a steep bank; and I’m still following the well-trodden path that twists uphill by the side of the restless stream, although what could be more enticing and romantic than that?

  Another fragment drifts into the day.

  Up the airy mountain,

  Down the rushy glen,

  We daren’t go a-hunting

  For fear of little men;

  I have a feeling Wilkie would have scoffed at this piece of Victorian doggerel, although as he and Henry blundered uphill and downhill in search of their waterfall, they were blocked every inch of the way by a ‘miniature forest of vegetation’ – ‘weeds, ferns, brambles, bushes, and young trees’ – quite possibly ‘commissioned’, he grew to believe, ‘by some evil genius of Fairy Mythology to prevent mortal footsteps from intruding into the valley’. You would have thought all Wilkie and Henry needed to do was follow the river upstream, but instead they ended the day entangled in ‘a labyrinth of overgrown bushes which might have bewildered an Australian settler’. So he left frustrated and without ever seeing the waterfall. Perhaps he would have had better luck if he’d tried calling the place by the name everyone else knows it by: St Nectan’s Kieve, named after the last lonely home of a sainted Celtic hermit. Inevitably, and in a rather too pat exemplar of their different characters – meandering Wilkie, supercharged Charles – when Dickens had visited here eight years earlier he marched straight to the source and splashed around in its waters.

  To get to the sacred falls today, all you need to do is follow an easy path past St Piran’s Church, described on a nearby sign, for some reason, as ‘sadly now restored’. Our resentment of change runs deep. When Nirad Chaudhuri was travelling the land for a few weeks in the late 1950s, he was taken by an English friend to see ‘a pretty village, and pointing to a section of the street, [the friend] said, “That bit is quite unspoilt.” Nothing more, not a word to explain what unspoilt meant in that context, though the notion of an unspoilt place was so very English.’

  Leaving the restored church, you must head through a wet and once wild wood of pine, sycamore, rhododendron, laurel, bamboo and ferns, passing little stone cairns by the side of the stream and ribbons and wind chimes in the trees. Or maybe you can take advantage of the new car park that is being carved into the hillside and walk straight up to the kiosk and pay your admission fee and borrow some wellington boots and head down to the falls, where there are yet more ribbons and joss sticks and a mysterious mélange of Hindu, Celtic and Buddhist artefacts, and here, standing in the holy waters, you can grope around for the pulse of St Nectan or any last trace of the Knights of the Holy Grail. But I have decided I’m sticking with Wilkie.

  The valley is famous not just for its original hermit, but for two women who, inspired by St Nectan, came to live here in medieval times. This gives Wilkie the chance to roll out one of his trademark stories. The women, he writes, were harmless – they just wanted to be alone – but ‘there was something so sinister and startling about the unearthly seclusion and secrecy of their lives, that people began to feel vaguely suspicious, to whisper awful imaginary rumours about them, to gossip over old stories of ghosts and false accusations’. And so the locals started to spy on the women, and they thought they could hear them talking in a ‘diabolical language of their own’, and who knows where this would have led except one of the women died, and then the other, without ever saying a word to the locals; and Wilkie, standing by a ruined cottage, which he is convinced is the one in which the two women once lived, manages to get quite spooked, and notices that the air in this place is unusually still and heavy, and that ‘the evening is at hand, and the vapours are rising in the wood’. So he hurries away to the bright wide spaces of the coastal path.

  One hundred years later, Ithell was also here, on the trail of the two women who were persecuted for wanting to be alone. And here I am, as another day ends, standing inside one of the derelict buildings that must, I am sure, be the same one that Ithell and Wilkie described, except now the walls and trees are hung with ribbons and dried flowers and the thick sticky mud underfoot has been trampled and churned by many other visitors. There’s a low square hole in one wall, where the footsteps lead, and on an impulse I stoop to crawl through – I am wriggling, I cannot help but feel, through some primordial channel – and there, on a granite wall, are carved two small early Bronze Age labyrinths. Or maybe that’s what they are – there’s a chipped and faded sign that seems dubious about their age – but I am surprised to find them here at all, because Wilkie never mentioned them, nor did John Betjeman. But Ithell, whom I should have read with more care, knew them as the ‘Troy Stones’, and although she thought they didn’t look ancient (or perhaps, she said, they had been recut in recent times), she also believed that they might ‘even now be used to instil the secrets of circle and cross’. Is that what is going on here? Is that why there are so many footprints and so many tokens of remembrance and worship?

  Do certain places hold human memories? Is there a way for us to open up to those memories and connect to the essence of a rock, or a holy spring, or a landscape? A landscape that is shaped not just by the physical impact of humanity, but also by our acts of worship and spirit? Ithell would have said so. We just need to remember how. She believed the spirits of the successors of St Nectan were here, near these immemorial mazes, inhabiting and infusing the walls and the trees. She could feel their presence and hear their call.

>   The labyrinths on the Troy Stones look like a cross-section of a human brain, or even the Tree of Life. They are simple and satisfying. Perhaps, as Ithell says, they allude to the dance called the ‘Walls of Troy’ that could lead us to the afterworld and back. It is no coincidence, she says, that the leaves on the trees by the stones are dying of a blight that you won’t find in any other part of the valley. The spirit of St Nectan – and the message of the stones – is not necessarily benign. But what do we know? Do we think there is something otherworldly, just out of reach of our daily reckonings, stirring among these woods and ruins? Or is that just projection? I mean, is the act of standing here, opening myself to the spirit of a place, as Ithell suggested, of standing alone with my senses quietened and receptive – isn’t that just going to make the appearance of the numinous more likely?

  All I can say for certain is that there is beauty and wonder and a thread of familiar belonging in the rocks and the soil of this lonely place. And I had known nothing about the stones and their associations before I squeezed through that slippery window. I had to read Ithell more carefully, later, to pick the meaning from her words. But standing here in front of them now I feel a rising sense of awe. And then, something black – a crow, I am sure – shifts behind me in a tree and all of a sudden I can’t wait to follow Wilkie, away from these walls and the insidious woods, and back down to the fading clarity of the coast.

  There’s one last visit. And time for one last story from Wilkie about the behaviour of a profane sea captain who was bringing bells from London for Forrabury Church, but instead brought down the wrath of God on his head and was drowned with all his crew, which is why, to this day, there are no bells in the tower of the church. But Wilkie’s heart is not in it. He is keen to get to Launceston, and Plymouth, and back to his mother and friends in London, although he is also dawdling in the churchyard because ‘at this point we leave the coast, not to return to it again … and with this evening, our pleasant days of strolling travel are ended’.