The village and nearby Tintagel Castle are associated with the legends surrounding King Arthur and in recent times have become a tourist attraction.

Toponymists have had difficulty explaining the origin of 'Tintagel': the probability is that it is Norman French, as the Cornish of the 13th century would have lacked the soft 'g' ('i/j' in the earliest forms: see also Tintagel Castle).

[4] The name first occurs in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136, in Latin) as Tintagol, implying pronunciation with a hard [g] sound as in modern English girl.

The modern-day village of Tintagel was always known as Trevena (Cornish: Tre war Venydh) until the Post Office started using 'Tintagel' as the name in the mid-19th century.

Treknow is the largest of the other settlements in the Tintagel parish, which also include Bossiney, Truas, Trebarwith, Tregatta, Trenale, Trethevy, Treven, Trevillet, and Trewarmett.

Paradoxically it now enjoys a temporary prosperity as a result of tourist interest in the castle which was converted so romantically by Geoffrey of Monmouth into an ancient residence of King Arthur."

Trebarwith was the scene of the shipwreck of the Sarah Anderson in 1886 (all on board perished),[16] but the most famous of the wrecks happened on 20 December 1893, at Lye Rock when the barque Iota was driven against the cliff.

The crew were able to get onto the rock and apart from a youth of 14 were saved by four men (three of these from Tintagel: one of them, Charles Hambly, received a Vellum testimonial and three medals for bravery afterwards).

[17][18] On 6 July 1979, Tintagel was briefly subject to national attention when an RAF Hawker Hunter fighter aircraft crashed into the village following an engine malfunction; the unusual incident caused significant damage and consternation, but no deaths.

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.

Excavations around Tintagel Castle have supported the notion of trade goods there, with ships from along the Atlantic Coast and the Mediterranean Sea bringing pots carrying wine or oil, in the Early medieval period.

The site appeared to be one of the places where a local king or warlord, perhaps of Dumnonia, and his entourage settled for a time, and traded with ships arriving from those far ports.

[19] Major excavations beginning with C. A. Ralegh Radford's work in the 1930s on and around the site of the 12th-century castle have revealed that Tintagel headland was the site of either a high status Celtic monastery (according to Ralegh Radford) or a princely fortress as well as trading settlement dating to the 5th and 6th centuries (according to later excavators), in the period immediately following the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain.

In 1998, excavations discovered the Artognou stone, which has added to Tintagel's Arthurian lore, although historians do not believe the inscription refers to King Arthur.

[22][23] There are many other relics of antiquity to be found here such as the so-called King Arthur's Footprint on the Island and a carved rock from Starapark which has been placed outside the Sir James Smith's School at Dark Lane, Camelford.

The inscription can be read as 'Aelnat fecit hanc crucem pro anima sua' (Ælnat made this cross for [the good of] his soul) – the back of the stone has the names of the four evangelists.

[33][34] The site and glebe lands were the home of the vicars as early as the mid-13th century when the benefice came into the hands of the Abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou, France.

[37] It was built for custard powder manufacturer F. T. Glasscock as the headquarters of the "Fellowship of the Knights of the Round Table", behind Trevena House.

A variety of Cornish stones are used in the construction and the 73 stained glass windows illustrating the Arthurian tales are by Veronica Whall; there are several paintings of scenes from the life of King Arthur by William Hatherell.

[38][39] In 1927, the Order of the Fellowship of the Knights of the Round Table was formed in Britain by Frederick Thomas Glasscock (a retired London businessman, d. 1934)[40] to promote Christian ideals and Arthurian notions of medieval chivalry.

The Great Hall on the first floor is designed around a replica of the Winchester Round Table and has Romanesque arcades with Italian marble piers.

Near Dunderhole Point on Glebe Cliff stands a building from the former slate quarry that has been used as Tintagel Youth Hostel (managed by YHA) for many years.

In the Middle Ages, there was also a chapel of St Denys at Trevena: the annual fair was therefore celebrated in the week of his feast day (19 October).

The name commemorates the abbey in France which held the patronage of Tintagel during the Middle Ages (the commune is now known as Fontevraud-l'Abbaye), founded by Robert of Arbrissel.

The slate was mainly used for roofing and the remains of quarry buildings and machinery strong points can be seen from both sea level and the South West Coast Path.

The birds of the coast are well worth observing: in 1935 an anonymous writer mentions Willapark as the scene of spectacular flocks of seabirds (eight species); inland he describes the crows (including the Cornish chough and the raven) and falcons which frequent the district.

[65] "Within easy reach of Tintagel at least 385 varieties of flowers, 30 kinds of grasses, and 16 of ferns can be found ... a 'happy hunting ground' for botanists" and a list of thirty-nine of the rarest is given.

The Social Hall established by Mrs Ruth Homan[67] and the Old School in Fore Street have been the chief meeting places during most of the 20th century.

[71][72] Tintagel is used as a locus for the Arthurian mythos by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the poem Idylls of the King and Algernon Charles Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse, a literary version of the Tristan and Iseult legend.

[78] During the 19th century, Tintagel was visited by many writers, including Robert Stephen Hawker, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and the mystic philosopher Rudolf Steiner.