Finding Camlann (14 page)

‘Is there something special about Devonian sandstone?’

‘Well, I suppose its most notable feature is that the high iron oxide content typically gives it a rather striking dark red colour. As I recall, Bowen was especially interested in this, and also in the steepness of the terrain. For some reason, he was looking for places in Wales where he might find tall cliffs made of reddish-coloured rock. We had no idea why, but still we obliged him by sending him several large geological maps marked up with the most likely locations.’

It all seems to fall perfectly into place. In his analysis of the Song of Lailoken, Bowen made a forceful argument that the battle descriptions in the poem referred to real events, that these were the battles of Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r as captured in verse by the bard Siôn Cent. There is one particularly vivid depiction of Glyn D
ŵ
r and his companions trapped in the crooked valley, grimly awaiting the final English attack.

We strove for the heights but they held us there

Caught us at sun’s falling, trapped at axe’s edge

Grimly we gathered, in close rank, certain of death

Crags raised red like bloodied fists above us

The distant water rushing, whispering, sighing

The river, a wolf’s-head smile carved far below.

Caradoc Bowen thought he could find this place, the valley where Glyn D
ŵ
r made his final stand, by interpreting the clues in Siôn Cent’s poem. This was the obsession that drove him, that caused him to lose the confidence of his peers and tarnished his reputation as one of the foremost scholars of the Celtic world.

‘I can tell you’ve an interesting idea lurking in there somewhere,’ James Gladstone says, looking at his son with kindly scepticism. ‘Do let me know when it has found its way out.’

‘Did Bowen ever contact you again?’

‘Not as I recall. It would have taken him months, even years, to visit all the places we marked on the map. If he ever found what he was looking for, we certainly never heard about it.’

‘I don’t imagine he ever did find it.’ Donald feels a faint stirring of unease as he reflects on his meeting with Caradoc Bowen and the unexpected letter that followed. Anxious now to be on his way, h Son ng oe glances at his watch.

The gesture does not escape his father’s notice. ‘Will you stay for lunch, at least?’

‘I’m really sorry, Dad, but I have a long drive ahead of me.’

Backing out of his father’s drive a few minutes later, Donald is oppressed by a vague sense of melancholy and guilt. The lanky, stooping figure in the doorway recalls random scenes from half a lifetime of partings at this green door with its perennially flaking paint, memories of driving back to university after the Christmas break, of setting off on a trip to Scotland with Sally-Ann Bright, the red-haired girl from the second-hand bookshop on St. Aldates, around the time he almost asked her to marry him. It crosses his mind that it might be the most natural thing in the world for Audrey Jenkins to be standing there on the doorstep with his father; his mother, after all, never lived in this house. It has always been an austere and solitary place, with James Gladstone’s slowly fading grief lying over it like a dusty shroud. Perhaps Audrey would let in some much-needed daylight.

Donald forces the Morris into first gear, gives one last wave, senses rather than sees his father turn back wearily into the empty house. He rejoins the main road in Chewton, follows it up the gentle rise of Nedge Hill to the top of the plate
au. As the dim green expanse of the Somerset levels begins to open up ahead of him, forming a broad new horizon above the southern Mendip edge, his spirits begin to lift. The city of Wells comes gradually into view, the buildings of the old market town clustered tightly about their majestic cathedral. In the hazy distance beyond, Glastonbury Tor, an improbably steep-sided island, seems to float somewhere above the plain. Driving on through the narrow, busy streets of Wells, then on out to the south-west across wide-open countryside towards the distant county of Cornwall, Donald is gripped by a new sense of excitement at the possibilities of the world.

A Castle Built High
Above the Sea

W
ITHIN HALF AN
hour of leaving his father’s house, Donald is driving through a marshy landscape haunted since the seventeenth century by ghostly cries said to belong to the soldiers of the Duke of Monmouth, who was taken prisoner by the royalist forces of his Roman Catholic uncle, James II, after the Battle of Sedgemoor in 1685. Monmouth was executed for treason at the Tower of London in July of that year. He calmly paid the axe man, Jack Ketch, to do a clean and merciful job, but Ketch lost his nerve, taking five bloody strikes to relieve the duke of his head.

Then comes the cider country between lines of rugged hills to the west and south, the Quantocks and the looming Blackdown range marking the border between Somerset and Devon. The weather seems well adjusted to Donald’s state of mind, showers arriving overhead at regular intervals between short intermissions of bright sunshine and crystal blue sky. On the far side of Honiton, a grim resolve asserts itself as he finds himself trapped by a series of heavy downpours in the middle of a convoy of high-sided lorries. These unstable vehicles veer from side to side as they catch the wind, their wheels kicking up huge drowning sheets of spray. He is forced to work his way through the pack, pulling out to overtake each in turn, putting his foot to the floor and hanging on determinedly as the Morris inches its way past, then finally back to the safety of the inside lane.

Thus he makes a halting south-westerly progress towards Exeter, the Roman city of Isca Dumnonioru Vh="m established in 79
AD
at the south-western limit of imperial administration in Britain. In the sparsely populated peninsular lands to the west, the Roman presence was restricted to a handful of lonely military outposts and trading stations along the edges of the moors. This was otherwise deemed a rugged and inhospitable land best left to its Celtic peoples, the Dumnonii, who maintained a form of independence through four hundred years of imperial rule.

The rolling green hill-country of Devon carries Donald to the edge of Dartmoor, where he skirts to the north of the bleak rocky uplands on which Holmes and Watson heard the baleful cry of the hound. Dropping down into the valley of the Tamar, he crosses the river at Launceston, ancient capital and gateway to Cornwall. Soon he begins passing signs to numerous small villages, Tregadillett, Tregeare, Tresmeer, Treneglos, Tremail, and Trelash, evidence enough for a Cornishman that England has truly been left behind.

This is the land of Lucy Trevelyan’s paternal forebears, who once held sway in the parish of St. Veep near Lostwithiel on the south Cornish coast, where they were noted for their fertile production of Tory politicians and historians in Victorian times. As far as Donald can remember, Lucy never showed any interest in renewing her ancestral ties to the famous Trevelyan clan. It occurs to him in a theoretical way, as he urges the Morris on up to the higher ground, that Lucy’s disparagement of her provincial forebears is as much an expression of her need to be at the cultural centre of things as it is a rejection of the conservative values that were so firmly embedded in her Cornish lineage.

There is a more straightforward explanation, too, that Lucy’s posture towards her Trevelyan kin is a simple denial of any shred of allegiance to her own father. When she was in her early teens, Philip Trevelyan, himself a scholar of some repute, was discovered
in flagrante
with a postgraduate student half his age, whereupon Lucy’s embittered American mother, never at home in England, seized the moment to take her daughter and two young sons back to California. These experiences helped Lucy to grow into adulthood with a strongly developed sense of self-determination. When, in her late twenties, she arrived to take up a readership at St. Anne’s College, Oxford (having already made her mark in the women’s studies department at Berkeley), she was fully prepared to deploy her illustrious surname as a battle-sword of her personal academic freedom.

To the right, the land is now dropping gently away to the valley of the River Ottery. To the left rises the barren edge of Bodmin Moor, a vast and desolate tract of rocky outcrops and treeless hills where, long before the Roman occupation, tunnels were dug by bronze-age man to find the precious tin ore. The sun is low in the south-west, making sharp, craggy silhouettes of the angular granite tors that rise like puzzling sculptures on the hilltops. Somewhere high up there on the moor is Dozmary Pool, where it is said that Sir Bedivere, commanded repeatedly by the dying King Arthur, threw Excalibur into the deep dark water, there to be received by the Lady of the Lake.

Donald leaves the main road at Trewassa, heads down a narrow back road towards the coast. As the lane twists and turns interminably across the heathland, it seems to him that he has taken a wrong turning into some ancient, inescapable maze. At last he drops down a long hill into the village of Tintagel, where he finds a cluster of brick and stone buildings, old and new, assembled in homage to the Arthurian tourist trade. It is not yet two o’clock; he is more than an hour early for his rendezvous.

The Cornish tourist season is long past, leaving windblown, half-deserted streets [rtevouwith the atmosphere of Blackpool or Skegness after the summer crowds have left. Donald parks the car on Fore Street, walks on past the King Arthur’s Arms and the Excalibur Tea Room, with its brightly painted sign depicting an imposing Arthur in full armour, visor up, sipping tea from a delicate floral cup. At the Uther Pendragon Bookshop, he stops to look in at the window display, smiles with a grim irony as he sees the predictable collection of real-Arthur potboilers set alongside various new-age enchantments that might cause even his ex-wife to blush. A serious-looking couple hovers nearby, debating quietly over the purchase of a yellow plastic sword that their young son has discovered in a large bin outside the door of the shop. Grinning broadly, the boy unsheaths this weapon from its scabbard and flourishes it in front of them.

‘Look, Dad!’ he says. ‘Guess what sword this is?’

His father speaks to him carefully, as if confirming a difficult point of history. ‘Yes, Charlie, that’s Excalibur, that is.’

The lane next to the bookshop runs steeply down beneath high stone walls overgrown with ivy. At the bottom of the hill, Donald crosses a bridge over a small stream and joins an old medieval track that climbs up to a low summit where a tall, tapered stone stands half-buried in the hedge. Ahead of him, Tintagel Island rises steeply from the slate-grey Atlantic breaking white at the base of the cliffs. A rocky isthmus joins the island to the mainland, the sea surging and foaming into narrow inlets on either side. High above, white dots of gulls and fulmars hover and swoop across the crumbling ramparts of a medieval castle, sending their mournful, avaricious cries along the westerly sea-breeze.

Earl Richard’s famous castle at Tintagel is now forever entwined with the popular mythology of Arthur. Richard, the younger brother of Henry III, acquired the manor of Bossiney, including Tintagel Island, in 1233, and there established his stronghold. He was certainly familiar with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of the British kings, which was by then well known throughout Europe. According to Geoffrey, it was in an ancient fortress on the island that the future King Arthur was conceived. This was the fanciful story that inspired Richard to build his own Arthurian citadel.

In Geoffrey’s tale, Uther Pendragon sought the love of the fair Ygerna, wife of Duke Gorlois of Cornwall. The duke, who was then at war with Uther, hid his bride at Tintagel, thinking her perfectly protected from the Pendragon’s assault by the great ramparts of the keep and by the steep and narrow approach to the castle gate. But Uther’s love was not to be thwarted by mere walls of stone.

He called to him Ulfin of Ridcaradoch, one of his soldiers and a familiar friend, and told him what was on his mind. ‘You must tell me how I can satisfy my desire for her, for otherwise I shall die of the passion which is consuming me.’ ‘Who can possibly give you useful advice,’ answered Ulfin, ‘when no power on earth can enable us to come to her where she is inside the fortress of Tintagel? The castle is built high above the sea, which surrounds it on all sides, and there is no other way in except that offered by a narrow isthmus of rock. Three armed soldiers could hold it against you, even if you stood there with the whole kingdom of Britain at your side. If only the prophet Merlin would give his mind to the problem, then with his help I think you might be able to obtain what you want.’ Merlin was summoned, and he used his black arts to transform Uther into the image of Gorlois. Queen Ygerna, thinking this was her duke returned unexpectedly from the war, spent that night with Uther in the castle, and there concei [ thois. Queeved Arthur, the most famous of men.

In the 1930s, Professor C. A. Ralegh Radford excavated extensively on the island, unearthing many artefacts from the post-Roman period. Most impressive of all were the fragments of giant amphorae, jars for wine and olive oil imported from the Mediterranean. All of this, Ralegh Radford said, was evidence of an early Celtic monastery dating from the fifth or sixth century
AD
, the time of Arthur. Later generations of archaeologists would modify their distinguished predecessor’s version of events: this was not, they said, the retreat of ascetic monks, but the stronghold of Celtic chieftains, a line of British warriors whose exploits, captured in local folklore and heroic verse, were picked up by Geoffrey of Monmouth and transformed by his prodigious imagination into a legend of Arthur’s birthplace.

Something soft is nudging at Donald’s calf. He looks down to find a large tabby cat staring back at him, bright green eyes wide with curiosity. It has a collar around its neck with a name-tag attached:
Galahad
, Glebe Hill Farm, Tintagel. He strokes it under the chin, and with this encouragement the cat begins purring loudly, meanwhile performing a complicated figure-of-eight loop through his legs. When Donald continues on his way, Galahad trots ahead of him.

There is a fork in the path ahead, the right-hand branch leading down towards the narrow approach to Tintagel Island. Donald’s first thought is to cross over for a closer look at the ruins; but now he sees something that stops him in his tracks. At the nearer end of the isthmus, perhaps a hundred yards below him, a dozen or more people are gazing up at the castle walls. They are archaeologists, fellow attendees at the symposium, many of them people he knows. There amongst them is the tall, graceful, unmistakable figure of Lucy Trevelyan.

The cat has meanwhile continued to the left, in the direction of Glebe Cliff. Donald follows in its footsteps, picking his way up the steep track to the clifftop, sure that Lucy will have seen him by now; he can only hope that she will not try to come after him. When the path divides again, he takes the southerly branch towards the church standing alone in the fields to the left. Galahad, meanwhile, continues on his own secret quest, stepping purposefully through the rough grass without so much as a backward glance.

The Parish Church of St. Materiana, in its solitary location on an exposed promontory scourged by Atlantic storms, seems remote from modern Tintagel, a throwback to some former pattern of village life. Numerous low grassy mounds close to the church, identified as early Christian burials, confirm that the site has been sacred ground for at least fourteen hundred years. Donald enters through the lych-gate and makes his way across the churchyard, conscious of stepping on centuries of anonymous Cornish people, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them laid out beneath him, head to the west, feet to the east. Someone has laid fresh flowers, white and yellow and red, on one of the newer graves.

Turning the latch on the heavy oak door of the church, Donald steps into the dimly lit interior and drops a few coins into the collection box before continuing along the nave, footsteps echoing on the flagstones. He stops for a while in front of one of the more striking memorials, a tall brass plaque set into the floor near the entrance to the chapel.

HERE LIES JOHN ANSELL, BELOVED SCHOOLMASTER IN THIS PARISH, AND WORTHY POET, WHO DIED THE 20TH DAY OF DECEMBER, 1842. ALSO HIS WIFE MERRYN, WHO DIED THE 19TH DAY OF JUNE, 1843, FROM THE WEIGHT OF SADNESS THAT WAS IN HER HEART. MAY THEY BE REUNITED AT LAST IN PEA [T LS THACE.

The words of a poem are inscribed beneath, an oblique ode to Thomas Gray’s
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
; perhaps the work of Ansell himself, penned in anticipation of his own demise.

A sleeping churchyard finds the muse

Of England’s poet, framed by death

He rhymes unknown an epitaph

Of silent dust and fleeting breath.

Along this path in dreaming-space

Treads phrase world-weary, hopeful, wise

A life, unmourned, has dimly passed—

Grey stone recalls where cold bone lies.

His mind’s eye in the future spies

Fair wand’rer chanced upon his tomb

She stops to read, then shake away

Chill-fingered pledge of coming doom.

What if one day such lyric gaze

Should glance across his perished lines?

How would she speak, what history tell

Fond thought regale, or truth divine?

What says the wind in yew tree’s bough

Or raindrops darkening the pane?

How sings the grass grown high above

The thick black earth that bears his name?

The tale’s forgot, the time long spent

The clock heard striking on the tower

All traded now for passing grace

In transient year, by vanished hour.

Let grandchild’s child forget those days:

A summer’s eve, a hand held fast

The skylark’s song above the field