[14] Mr. Glennie thinks the scene is in Carnarvonshire, to the south of Snowdon, overlooking the lower end of Llyn y Dinas. Here is Dinas Emrys, a singular isolated rock, clothed on all sides with wood, containing on the summit some faint remains of a building defended by ramparts. It was of this place Drayton wrote-- “And from the top of Brith, so high and wondrous steep Where Dinas Emris stood, showed where the serpents fought, The White that tore the Red; from whence the prophet wrought The Briton’s sad decay then shortly to ensue.” On the south of Carnarvon Bay is Nant Gwrtheryn, the Hollow of Vortigern, a precipitous ravine by the sea, said to be the last resting-place of the usurper, when he fled to escape the rage of his subjects on finding themselves betrayed to the Saxons. [15] The Cornish language was spoken until 1768. In that year Daines Barrington met the old fish-wife Dolly Pentreath, whose name has become memorable as that of the last person to speak Cornish. The last sermon in Cornish was preached in 1678 in Landewednack Church. The slackening of the Saxon advance at the Tamar enabled the Cornish to preserve their tongue, closely allied to that of Wales and Brittany, and described as “naughty Englysshe” in the reign of the eighth Henry. [16] The following curious little item from R. Hunt’s volume ought not to be lost sight of:--“I shall offer a conjecture, touching the name of Tintagel, which I will not say is right but only probable. _Tin_ is the same as _Din_, _Dinas_, and _Dixeth_, deceit; so that Tindixel, turned for easier pronunciation to Tintagel, Dundagel, etc., signifies Castle of Deceit, which name might be aptly given to it from the famous deceit practised here by Uther Pendragon by the help of Merlin’s enchantment.” George Borrow says: “Tintagel does not mean the Castle of Guile, but the house in the gill of the hill, a term admirably descriptive” (_Wild Wales_, cap. cvii.). [17] It is difficult to understand how a writer like the late Mrs. Craik could ever have fallen into this error. In her _Unsentimental Journey through Cornwall_ she makes every effort to prove that the building on the mainland was the castle of Terabyl, and she insists that there were (and are) two castles at Tintagel. “One sits in the sea, and the other is upon the opposite heights of the mainland, with communication by a narrow causeway. This seems to confirm the legend, how Igraine’s husband shut himself and his wife in two castles, he being slain in the one, and she married to the victorious king Uther in the other.” It is obvious that the writer of these lines was unacquainted with Malory.