Written by David Caldwell · 5 September 2025

The Search for Camelot: Legend, Theories, and Evidence

Few names stir the imagination like Camelot. For centuries, poets, chroniclers, and dreamers have conjured images of King Arthur’s court - a place of noble fellowship, where the Round Table bound knights in loyalty, and where Guinevere and Lancelot played out dramas of love and betrayal. But beyond the myth lies a tantalising question: was Camelot real? And if so, where was it?

This question has haunted historians and archaeologists for generations. From the slopes of South Cadbury in Somerset, to the ruins of Tintagel on the Cornish coast, to claims as far afield as Scotland and Wales, the search for Arthur’s court has stretched across Britain. In the process, it has revealed not only fragments of ancient walls and pottery, but also a great deal about how legend and history entwine.

The Birth of a Legend

Camelot does not appear in the earliest Arthurian sources. Gildas, writing in the sixth century, makes no mention of Arthur at all. Nennius, a few centuries later, lists Arthur as a war leader who fought twelve great battles against the Saxons - but again, there is no court, no Camelot.

It was in the twelfth century, with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, that Arthur began to crystallise as more than a shadowy warlord. Geoffrey painted Arthur as a British king of grandeur, ruling from Caerleon in South Wales. Later French romances, particularly those of Chrétien de Troyes, added the Round Table, the courtly love stories, and a new, French-sounding name: Camelot. From this point on, Arthur’s court was inseparable from the legend.

But where was Camelot supposed to be? Geoffrey gave Caerleon, others suggested Winchester, and still others Glastonbury. By the nineteenth century, when Victorians were enthralled by medieval revival, Camelot was everywhere - in stained glass, in poetry, and in place-name speculation.

Early Theories: Winchester, Glastonbury, and Beyond

Winchester was long promoted as Camelot. The so-called “Round Table” hanging in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle - actually a massive 13th-century construction, later painted under Henry VIII - was presented as proof. Pilgrims and antiquarians were told this was Arthur’s very table. As one Hampshire newspaper mused in 1940, there was no shortage of local tradition to support the claim. Yet historians increasingly doubted that Winchester, with its medieval associations, could truly be the source of the legend.

Glastonbury, too, laid claim to Arthurian heritage. Monks at Glastonbury Abbey famously announced the discovery of Arthur and Guinevere’s graves in 1191, drawing pilgrims and prestige. By the twentieth century, Glastonbury was woven so tightly with the Avalon myth that many simply assumed Camelot must be nearby. Local societies, such as the Honourable Society of Knights of the Round Table, kept the legend alive with pageantry and pseudo-historical claims.

Others looked further north. Caerleon, with its Roman amphitheatre, was once promoted as Arthur’s seat. Edinburgh and Carlisle claimed Arthur’s presence through place-names like “Arthur’s Seat.” Even more radical theories pushed Camelot into Scotland - ideas that Geoffrey Ashe, the noted Arthurian scholar, dismissed as “absolute rubbish.”

A Somerset Hill: Cadbury Castle

It was in Somerset, however, that the search took on real archaeological substance. Rising above the countryside near Yeovil, Cadbury Castle is a vast Iron Age hillfort, its ramparts still commanding the landscape. Long known in folklore as “Camalet,” it had local traditions linking it with Arthur. A 16th-century antiquary, John Leland, recorded villagers insisting that “at the very south-end of the church of South-Cadbyri standeth Camallate, sometime a famous town or castle.”

By the mid-20th century, serious scholars began to take Cadbury seriously as a candidate. The site’s scale, defensive strength, and commanding views suggested it could indeed have housed a warlord of Arthur’s stature. Excavations, first tentative, then more ambitious, promised to test the legend against the soil itself.

The Camelot Research Committee

The turning point came not from a professional archaeologist, but from an amateur enthusiast. In the early 1960s, Mrs. Mary Harfield, a 77-year-old housewife from Penselwood, became convinced that the lonely hill near her village concealed Arthur’s stronghold. When she heard that the surrounding fields were about to be ploughed, she rushed out and picked up what looked like fragments of pottery and an oil jar. One piece was identified as Mediterranean in origin - the sort of luxury item that only a wealthy patron, perhaps a ruler, might have imported in the Dark Ages.

Unwilling to let the matter drop, Harfield did something extraordinary: she rang up the commanding officer at the RAF base in Yeovil and asked if he could send a reconnaissance plane to photograph the hill. Amused but intrigued, the RAF obliged. The aerial photographs, showing what looked like the ghostly outlines of ancient buildings beneath the crops, strengthened her suspicions.

Soon afterwards, Harfield’s finds were passed to leading archaeologists, among them Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the most celebrated excavators of his day. By 1966, a formal body had been established - the Camelot Research Committee - drawing in not only Wheeler, but also Leslie Alcock of University College, Cardiff, and the West Country historian C. A. Raleigh Radford. Their mission was clear: to investigate Cadbury Castle in a systematic way, and to test whether it could plausibly be Camelot.

The 'Big Dig' at Cadbury

In 1966, the committee launched what the press quickly dubbed the “Big Dig.” It was the largest archaeological excavation ever mounted on a British hillfort, involving dozens of students, volunteers, and experts working over multiple seasons. The dig was given extra sparkle by the involvement of the Honourable Society of Knights of the Round Table of Glastonbury, who offered chivalric support, and by the steady stream of journalists eager for news of Camelot.

The findings were spectacular. Beneath the Iron Age ramparts, Alcock’s team uncovered evidence of reoccupation in the fifth and sixth centuries - precisely the period in which Arthur is supposed to have lived. There were traces of a massive timber hall, perhaps 65 feet long, suitable for feasting a king and his retainers. Imported pottery, amphorae, and glassware from the Mediterranean suggested trade links far beyond Somerset, the kind of luxury befitting a warlord of power and prestige.

Even more exciting was the sheer scale of the fortifications. The Iron Age defences had been refurbished on an enormous scale in the late Roman or sub-Roman period. Thousands of men would have been needed to build and maintain them - evidence, Alcock argued, of a major regional stronghold.

Rival Claimants to Camelot

Even as spades struck soil at Cadbury, other places were being put forward as Camelot’s “true” home. Each site had its champions, its legends, and its sceptics.

Winchester has long claimed Camelot through its great “Round Table,” a painted medieval disc hanging in the Great Hall. Tintagel in Cornwall, birthplace of Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s chronicle, has produced Mediterranean pottery of the Arthurian period. Caerleon in South Wales, once a Roman fortress, was identified by Geoffrey himself as Arthur’s court. Each contender adds colour, yet none provides the scale of fortifications and wealth that Cadbury revealed.

Folklore and Enchantment at Cadbury

If archaeology offered one kind of proof, folklore provided another. For centuries, Cadbury Castle had been whispered about as Arthur’s hill. Local stories spoke of Arthur and his knights slumbering in its depths, ready to ride out in Britain’s hour of need. Some said that on midsummer’s eve, if you pressed your ear to the ground, you could hear the clatter of hooves and the clash of swords from beneath the earth.

The hill was also tied to fairy lore. In one account, a quern stone discovered on the site was said to have been used by elves to grind corn stolen from nearby fields. There was talk of enchanted treasure, of gates of iron and gold buried in the hillside, of “Queen Anne’s Well” as a wishing-place where crooked pins could secure desires.

Camelot Between Myth and History

Camelot has always existed in the space between imagination and fact. Medieval poets conjured its shining halls, Elizabethan antiquarians painted its Round Table, Victorian dreamers spun it into pageants, and 20th-century archaeologists brought trowels and measuring rods to Somerset soil. Each age, in its own way, has sought Camelot - and each has found the reflection it wished to see.

At Cadbury, the evidence is weighty: a fortress of staggering size, fortified in the very years when Britain teetered between Rome’s departure and Saxon advance. The feasting hall could have held a king and his companions; the Mediterranean imports whisper of trade, wealth, and prestige. And the folklore - of Arthur sleeping beneath the hill, of fairy querns and golden gates, of Queen Anne’s Well - insists that the past is never entirely gone, only folded into the earth, waiting for those who still believe to uncover it.

Yet Camelot may never have been a single place. Perhaps it is better understood as an idea: a vision of lost unity, a dream of order and justice in a world threatened by chaos. In that sense, Cadbury, Tintagel, Winchester, and Caerleon are not rivals but fragments - each preserving part of the myth, each offering its own doorway into the story.

Camelot endures because it was never just a fortress - it was, and is, a mirror. When we look for Arthur’s court, we are also looking for ourselves, for that imagined golden moment when courage and fellowship might stand against the dark. Whether or not Cadbury was Camelot, the search ensures that Arthur’s shadow still rides beside us.