Bossiney Road, Tintagel - 01840 779 084 tintagelvc@btconnect.com

Tintagel (meaning village on a mountain) is a civil parish and village situated on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. The population of the parish was 1,820 people (2001 census), and the area of the parish is 4,281 acres. The parish population decreased to 1,727 at the 2011 census. An electoral ward also exists extending inland to Otterham. The population of this ward at the same census was 3,990.

The village and nearby Tintagel Castle are associated with the legends surrounding King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The village has, in recent times, become attractive to day-trippers and tourists, and is one of the most-visited places in Britain.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136), Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, puts his wife Igraine in Tintagol while he's at war (posuit eam in oppido Tintagol in littore maris: "he put her in the oppidum Tintagol on the shore of the sea"). Merlin disguised Uther Pendragon as Gorlois so that Uther could enter Tintagel and impregnate Igraine while pretending to be Gorlois. Uther and Igraine's child was King Arthur.

Tintagel is also used as a locus for the Arthurian mythos by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the poem Idylls of the King.

Algernon Charles Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse is a literary version of the Tristan and Iseult legend in which some events are set at Tintagel. Thomas Hardy's The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse, a one-act play which was published in 1923, is another version of the same legend with events set at Tintagel (the book includes an imaginary drawing of Tintagel Castle at the period).

The Ravenna Cosmography, of around 700, makes reference to Purocoronavis, (almost certainly a corruption of Durocornovium), 'a fort or walled settlement of the Cornovii': the location is unidentified, but Tintagel and Carn Brea have both been suggested. (If this is correct then it would have been on the site of Tintagel Castle.)