A Disgruntled Tourist in King Arthur's Court: Archaeology and Identity at Tintagel, Cornwall

‘I expected … something’: imagination, legend, and history in TripAdvisor reviews of Tintagel Castle

“…The majority of Orange & Laviolette's interviewees were familiar with the legend (Orange & Laviolette 2010), but it is interesting to observe in the context of discourse analysis what reviewers choose to include and exclude. Reviews were coded 'Preconception' if they explicitly or implicitly alluded to motivations or expectations (41 text fragments) (Kladou et al 2015;Poria, Butler & Airey 2004).…”

“…Legend and history at Tintagel have been explored in the context of English Heritage's interpretative strategy 1 (Orange & Laviolette 2010;Robb 1998). Robb notes conflicting messages in interpretation, an 'officio-academic agnosticism' about Arthur (Robb 1998: 587), which Orange & Laviolette find still to be the case in 2010 when 'a significant number of visitors were left in a certain state of interpretive limbo' (Orange & Laviolette 2010: 105).…”

“…Does engagement with one or other give rise to different experiences? The present article builds on those of Robb (1998) and Orange & Laviolette (2010) to explore further Tintagel's dual identity in the context of this imaginative sense of place and physicality, by considering legend and history and their function in visitors' expectations and experiences, using TripAdvisor reviews as data and discourse analysis as a mode of inquiry.…”

Folklore and Public Archaeology in the UK

“…Looking more closely at, for example, Hilary Orange's (2006;Orange & Laviolette, 2010) interpretation of the 'conflicting' narratives of Tintagel, which is rich in the folklore of King Arthur (and listed by English Heritage as such), we can see how a concurrent interpretive presentation of folklore and archaeology may be beneficial to a site and heighten visitor experience of it. Orange's work considered the presentation of the archaeological and folkloric interpretations of Tintagel within the village (such as the Tourist Information point and shop) and on-site by English Heritage.…”

“…The village shop and English Heritage's marketing material promote the Arthur legend to tourists and would-be tourists, in contrast to the 'debunking' of Arthur narratives by English Heritage in their introductory video on-site, which in turn appears to conflict with on-site information panels which declare that, in spite of the lack of evidence, the atmosphere of Tintagel lends itself to the romantic nature of the legends. Such conflicts in presentation have, Orange found through on-site surveys, led to a confusion over Tintagel's history and the place of Arthur narratives within that history, leading in many instances to an 'unsatisfactory heritage experience' (Orange, 2006;Orange & Laviolette, 2010).…”