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The King Chough
Kill a chough, and you may have killed a king.
See it clearly
- What's there
- Clifftop castle ruins on a headland
- Legend from
- 12th century; later Cornish belief
- Tone
- Curious
Watch the black birds on the cliffs. One of them, they say, might be the king.
Tintagel Castle stands half on the mainland and half on a jagged headland above the sea. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the 12th century, named it as the place where King Arthur was conceived, with the help of Merlin, and the legend later moved Earl Richard of Cornwall to build a castle here. Writers also linked it with Tristan and Iseult. Robert Hunt, asking around Tintagel, found no one who linked Arthur with the raven, but was told that bad luck would follow anyone who killed a chough, because Arthur had been turned into one of these red-legged crows.