Bridging the gap between fantasy and reality

ASSUMING she can secure a timed ticket, Athena looks forward to revisiting Tintagel, Cornwall, following the opening of the new bridge there last month. Built of oak, steel and Cornish slate to the designs of Ney & Partners engineers and William Matthews Associates architectural practice, it’s the centrepiece of a £5 million investment by English Heritage in the site.

The new structure replaces a narrow land bridge that connected this dramatic island with the mainland in the Middle Ages (which has since collapsed). Crucial to the project was a generous donation of £2.5 million by Julia and Hans Rausing. Athena is delighted that English Heritage has secured such a large gift. It’s an achievement it urgently needs to repeat.

In creating the bridge, English Heritage might seem to be fleshing out a rather modest site with disproportionate extravagance. After all, although there are the remains of an early medieval settlement here—once identified as a monastery —and the very fragmentary remains of a 13th-century castle (which spanned the mainland and rock), few visitors really come to see these things. Instead they are drawn by the spectacular setting and the associations of Tintagel with the absorbing fiction of King Arthur.

Efforts to make the rock both more accessible and impressive—artfully making tangible and fleshing out the myth —however, have always been central to Tintagel’s success as a tourist destination. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, may have revived Victorian interest in Arthur, but it took the labours of Richard Byrn Kinsman, vicar of Tintagel from 1851–94, to attach them to remote Tintagel. He did so partly by providing access to it for the first time: in 1852, he created a flight of steps to the rock and erected the battlemented entrance court with a small shelter for guides.

Kinsman’s steps were superseded in the 1970s, when the first bridge was built. Last year, this 20th-century bridge was crossed by 230,584 visitors. Presumably, that number will now vastly increase. If there should be a concern with this project, indeed, it is not with the scale or design of the new bridge, but whether the surrounding rock can take the consequent wear and tear.

Does English Heritage’s attempt to respond to the Arthurian associations of the site with two new works of sculpture really—as some have asserted—constitute a dumbing-down? On balance, Athena thinks not.

There is, after all, no denying the long and strange history of this association. Nor are visitors ever likely to confuse fiction with reality. After all, few, if any, of the thousands of people who stand in line to be photographed with half a trolley at London’s King’s Cross Station beneath a sign saying Platform 9¾ believe that Harry Potter existed. Preaching truth to them would be to miss the point.

Does the attempt to respond to Arthurian associations constitute a dumbing-down?