No description of Camelot, with its courts and towers, its knights and people, could be more entrancing than Tennyson’s. He told of the mighty hall built by Merlin, with its mystic symbols in sculpture and statuary; and he said that it was reached by the “sacred mount”—
“And all the dim, rich city, roof by roof,
Tower after tower, spire by spire,
By grove and garden-lawn, and rushing brook.”
Arthur’s statue had been moulded with a crown, and “peaked wings pointing to the Northern Star,” and this representation again calls attention to the astronomical significance of the history of the king whose name is preserved in Arcturus, the star of first magnitude, above which is set “Arthur’s chair,” Ursa Major.
There may not be much to warrant the various traditions of Camelot, and there remains nothing to verify them. South Cadbury, or Cadbury Camp, silent and deserted as it now is, undoubtedly has a curious history. It was anciently known as Camallate and Camellek, and was early associated with King Arthur; it was a hill-fort of that strange, strong race of warriors, the Belgæ, who overran the southern counties and were dislodged from their strongholds with the greatest difficulty by the Romans. This camp was as the rallying-point in the British and Christian dominion of Gladerhaf, or Somerset. Some have supposed it was the Cathbrigion where Arthur routed the Saxons in a great battle, and so linked his name indissolubly with the locality. Leland in his Itinerary described it as “sometime a famous town or castle, upon a very torre or hill, wonderfully enstrengthened of nature”; and John Selden, in his notes to the Polyolbion of Drayton, definitely described it as “a hill of a mile compass at the top, four trenches encircling it, and twixt every one of them an earthen wall; the contents of it, within about twenty acres, full of ruins and relics of old buildings.” It has yielded various ancient weapons, Roman coins, a silver horseshoe, and articles of camp equipage. The four concentric deep ditches and the ramparts, forty-five feet apart, can still be traced, and the camp seems to have been originally connected with an extensive intrenchment on the opposite summit of the hill to the north-west. From its position Cadbury must have been an important station commanding the military road which ran from Bower Walls on the Avon to the neighbouring heights of Clevedon—the little town which gave birth to Arthur Henry Hallam, whose ancestral abode, Clevedon Court, is sheltered by the fir-trees which are seen grouped in gloom from Cadbury’s height. At Clevedon also dwelt Coleridge for a time, as several of his poems, written in celebration of the surrounding scenes, will for ever remind us. From Cadbury can be discerned the pretty village of Wrington, where is cherished the memory of the Rev. W. Leeves, who fashioned for “Auld Robin Gray” a fitting melody. It is easy to perceive that the possessor of a stronghold on Cadbury would be able to hold in subjection the entire district, and the name of the place appears to bear witness that a decisive battle once raged there, for cad is the Cornish and Cymrian word for battle, and bury for hill or brow.
But it is Arthur, and Arthur only, who is commemorated at Cadbury Camp to-day. There may be seen his Round Table, and the local superstition runs that within the charmed circle the king may be seen sitting with his knights behind barred golden gates. The great intrenchment is called the site of King Arthur’s Palace; in the field below is King Arthur’s Hunting Causeway; and it is King Arthur’s Well which springs from the hillside and bubbles up in the fourth ditch. These recall the wondrous past, the golden days, when the fame and splendour of Arthur’s Court were on all tongues, and the poet could long afterwards ask—
“Like Camelot what place was ever yet renown’d,
Where, as at Caerleon, oft he kept the Table Round,
Most famous for the sports at Pentecost so long,