AT CASTLE DORE

Evening Star, Issue 22462, 6 October 1936, Page 11

AT CASTLE DORE

HOidE OF KINO MARK THE SEARCH FOR A LEGEND Castle Core Is a prehistoric fort a few miles from the south Cornish coast, on the ridge between the tidal Fowey and the former Par estuary, which finished silting up a century ago and is now nearly built up, says a writer in the ‘ Manchester Guardian.’ In size and appearance it is no more than a minor specimen of Iron Age hilltop “ camp,” but in associations it is of special interest in that probably it was King Mark’s castle, and therefore the principal scene of “ the joys that were between La Belle Isoud and Sir Tristram.” At any rate Mark, Isoud (or Iseult), and Tristram are considered by students to be more authentically Arthurian than Arthur himself, so to speak; and, moreover, the neighbourhood of Castle Dare is evidently connected with both the name of Mark and the legendary history of King Mark, which is more than one can say in the case of Tintagel and Arthur. The castle js being excavated, and as a result something—perhaps a chapter, perhaps only a footnote —will be added to the romance of archaeology, if not to that of Tristram and Iseult. Unfortunately nothing of much importance has yet turned up, and soon work will have ceased, though it may possibly be resumed next year. Potsherds and a few beads have enabled the earliest occupation to be dated 250 b.c.-a.d. 50, but of the Dark Ages to which Mark belonged little has been found. INSPIRING SITE. Still there are the neatly-cut sections through ramparts and ditches, the wide, shallow trenches, the cheerful band of local unemployed who are doing the spadework, and the archaeologists with their sieves and trowels and tapes and shorts; and if it all seems rather incomprehensible to the inexpert their imagination is the more free, and the holiday folk who went up from the beaches and coves to watch were no doubt impressed. And so they should be impressed, even though they cannot be shown Iseult’s room or Tristram’s armour. The site alone is sufficiently inspiring. From the gorsc-grown banks you look over an immense spread of country and far out to sea. To the west are the Hensbarrow heights crowded with the so-called Cornish Alps, huge white pyramids of china-clay waste; below them

the town of St. Austell and scows of villages and hamlets straggle into one another along the bleak hillsides. South-westwards the eye soars over the great blue St. Anstell Bay to the mighty Dodham headland, and follows the coast back to the golden cliffs and Sands of fashionable Crinnis, lined with modern villas and hotels. In the north the horizon glides up into the high, tor-crested line of Bodmin Moor, into which the Fowey Valley 'makes its devious way, deep and forested; and on the farther side of that hidden river rounded, close-knit hills stretch tautly away towards Plymouth. THE ANCIENT ENGLAND. Over this panorama is spread the patterned mask of Today; fields and coverts and parks, ports and villages and “industrial areas,” streets and roads and railways; but on the ramparts of Castle Dore one cannot but lie aware that under the mask is the England of remote antiquity, that out on the Dodman, in the Luxulyan woods,, all over the Bodmin Moor, conspicuously on innumerable hilltops, and secretly below almost every alluvial meadow are the relics of ancient times,; some of them the products of Mark’s world, others as old then as Castla Dore is to us. And here, in the sky-roofed space between the banks where earlier in the year there promised a hay crop, a minute piece of the mask is being lifted. Men with Jong-handled Cornish spades are stripping the turf and rolling back at least 15 centuries, while others are carefully picking and scratching down to b.c. 250. The posthojes are the most exciting features of the castle as it has so far been disclosed, for they have to be plotted into the ground plans of the buildings. They appear to bo hopelessly confused, but the confident and knowledgeable director, Mr Raleign Radford, has already allotted them to two wooden palaces of widely separated dates, and the later of the two may be * regarded, without fear of successful contradiction, as Iseult’s home. THE REWARDS COME. But if the most interesting operation* are the clearing out of holes, the laborious scraping of the floors, though they have been pretty thoroughly scraped already by the farmer’s plough, is not without rewards. Groups of stones—* slate is the native rock —are meticulously laid bare in the hope that the director will see something significant in their arrangement, and every now and then there is a thrill—for not all the trowellers are hardened excavators —and u bit of pottery or a chunk of rust or carbon, or even a water-worn, pebble, dignified as a sling stone, is laid hopefully on a tray to he examined and charted, or discarded, by the authorities.