Cornwall Trip, Day 4: Tintagel Castle

Sunday was our last day, and we had to make the drive back, so we only had time to see one thing in the morning before heading out. We had our hearts set on Tintagel Castle, which is the legendary birthplace of King Arthur.

The drive there was the most treacherous part of the trip, worse than the first half of the trip there through the snow. For a while we had to drive down a narrow road with high walls of earth on both sides that our car barely fit into, as seen here:

The kicker was that this road is not one way. We are driving down the road and sure enough, another car comes the other way. We stop, there are a few moments of freaking out, and we have to back up about a hundred yards where there is a tiny section of road big enough for us to pull off to the side and let the other car pass. Fortunately this was winter and there weren't a lot of people around, so this only happened once, but we have no idea what they do when it's tourist season. It was totally insane.

Eventually we got there, and it turns out that the actual castle was built in the thirteenth century, whereas the legend of King Arthur is from the 6th century, so there's no way this was King Arthur's castle even if King Arthur actually existed, but it still could have been his birthplace or something. Anyway, the castle is in ruins now (I'm not sure why, when there are other things from that period that are still intact), and even if nobody knows anything about its historical significance, it's a pretty cool place. Unfortunately it was kind of rainy and unpleasant that day, and you have to climb up and down stairs and rocks to get around, but we still had fun.

Tintagel is another place on the coast, where there are a bunch of cliffs and it's really windy. This place was cool because there were also a bunch of caves, including the mythical Merlin's Cave, which Maeghan and Diane scurried down to get to and climb through, as seen in a couple of the pictures below.
















After visiting the castle we went to a Cornish pasty restaurant, which Lisa had been hunting for all weekend. She got the classic steak pasty:

They were delicious.

And that was the trip. We drove back in about 6 hours, which we were happy about. It was a pretty uneventful drive, and we got back exhausted and satisfied.