page_title: Tintagel
section_title: Toponymy
hierarchical_section_title: Tintagel / Toponymy
caption_attribution_description: Around Tintagel, Cornwall, England
context_page_description: Tintagel or Trevena is a civil parish and village situated on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall, England. The village and nearby Tintagel Castle are associated with the legends surrounding King Arthur and in recent times has become a tourist attraction.
  Treknow is the largest of the other settlements in the Tintagel parish.
context_section_description: 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). If it is Cornish then 'Dun' would mean Fort. Oliver Padel proposes 'Dun' '-tagell' meaning narrow place in his book on place names. There is a possible cognate in the Channel Islands named Tente d'Agel, but that still leaves the question subject to doubt.
  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. But in Layamon's Brut (MS Cotton Otho C.xi, f. 482), in early Middle English, the name is rendered as Tintaieol. The letter i in this spelling implies a soft consonant like modern English j; the second part of the name would be pronounced approximately as -ageul would be in modern French.
  An oft-quoted Celtic etymology in the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, accepts the view of Padel (1985) that the name is from Cornish *din meaning fort and *tagell meaning neck, throat, constriction, narrow (Celtic *dūn, "fort" = Irish dún, "fort", cf. Welsh dinas, "city"; *tagell = Welsh tagell, "gill, wattle").
  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. Until then, 'Tintagel' had been restricted to the name of the headland and of the parish.
caption: "Tintagel" sign
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "Around Tintagel, Cornwall, England", "Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon PowerShot SD3500 IS", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "180", "Image YResolution": "180", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "ACDSee Pro 6", "Image DateTime": "2014:08:12 18:36:39", "Image Artist": "Christine Linsdell", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image Copyright": "\u00a92010 Robert David Linsdell, some rights reserved, CC BY 4.0", "Image ExifOffset": "379", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "GPS GPSLatitudeRef": "N", "GPS GPSLatitude": "[50, 39, 808065/16384]", "GPS GPSLongitudeRef": "W", "GPS GPSLongitude": "[4, 45, 254925/32768]", "GPS GPSAltitudeRef": "0", "Image GPSInfo": "3419", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "3587", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "12090", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/400", "EXIF FNumber": "5", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "80", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2010:10:08 11:51:09", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2010:10:08 11:51:09", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "Y", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "3", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "13908/1607", "EXIF ApertureValue": "9297/2002", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "9297/2002", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "64/5", "EXIF SubSecTime": "909", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "0", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "0", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4126", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3094", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "3307", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "160000/9", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "1620000/91", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "d5ab3540a2328e6a8a87e5fffa81a0b0", "EXIF CameraOwnerName": "Julia Christina Linsdell"}