Camelot: The Archaeologists Digging For The Real King Arthur | Myth Hunters

According to legend, he was Britain's greatest king. The name of King Arthur resonates very deeply with the British. King Arthur led his Knights of the Round Table from Camelot, a vast, spectacular castle built on a hill. But was the legend of Camelot based on reality, or simply a myth? It's a very fuzzy and vague place. It's glorious and it's glamorous. If King Arthur really did exist, then the remains of his castle Camelot should lie buried somewhere in Britain. But where? In the 1960s, a team of archaeologists used the latest technology to try to prove the legend was real. They were led by Leslie Alcock, a brilliant, energetic showman who brought modern archaeology into the mainstream. And in 1966, Leslie Alcock was one of the rock and roll archaeologists of his day. Alcock identified a hill in Somerset, close to Glastonbury, as the most likely location for Camelot. But could he really prove it was the site of King Arthur's castle? If he succeeded, it would be one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. The man who would lay claim to Camelot was born in Manchester in 1925. As a boy, Leslie Alcock was a brilliant student, determined to better himself both mentally and physically. Dad seems to have been full of energy and drive. I found in his cycling diaries that he used to cycle 30 miles a day before going to school in the mornings. And you see that intellectually as well. He won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar and then another to Brazenose College, Oxford. But his education was interrupted. During the Second World War, Alcock was posted to India, where he joined the 7th Gurkha Rifles. He became fascinated by the subcontinent's history and archaeology. He learnt that the past isn't just what people write in textbooks, but often something tangible, hidden in the ground. In India, he would eventually go on to work for one of Britain's most flamboyant archaeologists, Sir Mortimer Wheeler. The story I'm telling you is not fantasy. Wheeler's role was quite crucial in a way. One of the newspaper reporters said if he hadn't turned into a great archaeologist, he'd have been a matinee idol. Moreover, we can relate this evidence... He was an amazingly charismatic character. ..which it is agreed... It's towards the end of his active life, but nonetheless, boy, could he still carry it on. And, I mean, terrible old goat still. Dan was invited by Sir Mortimer Wheeler to work at Mohenjo-daro, this incredibly important dig into the centre of the Indus civilisation. And I think he was taken on for a lot for his language skills, for his ability to get on with the locals, as much for his archaeological skills. In 1946, Alcock returned to a very different Britain, to the one he had left. Post-war, with its empire crumbling, the country was shattered, hungry and in need of a lift. A country desperate for new heroes. In the early 1950s, morale was boosted by the British expedition's conquest of Everest... ..and Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile. Reminders that Britain could still be great. He'd obviously used up his last ounce of energy, but what an achievement for Bannister and Britain. But there was one hero from the past people turned to more than any other. The modern growth of Arthur is something that happened after the Second World War, when people were thinking more about national roots, how they came to be so, and so forth. There was a resurgence of interest in the Arthurian legends, I think primarily because King Arthur was seen as a figure who'd united his country in order to fight off Germanic invaders. King Arthur was known as the once and future king. Legends said he would rise again and restore Britain to greatness. Part of the story is that Arthur is not really dead. He's in the Isle of Avalon or he's in a cave asleep or somewhere, and the idea grew up that somehow or other, Arthur would return and there would be a new golden age in Britain. Such was the fascination with King Arthur. Post-war historians and archaeologists wanted to prove the legend was based on facts, not just myth, and that Britain's very identity was forged under the blade of the mighty king. King Arthur was supposed to have ruled in the Dark Ages, around 500AD. He was said to have been born on the Cornish Isle of Tintagel, under the watchful eye of the wizard Merlin. The story goes that Arthur became the true king of the Britons as only he could draw the sword Excalibur that had been set in stone. He valiantly defeated invaders who came across the sea from Europe and in one battle single-handedly killed 960 men. He unified his country from warring factions. He defended it against invaders. He led a band of knights, the Knights of the Round Table, who were famous for their adventures, for finding the Holy Grail and rescuing damsels in distress. And at the heart of the legend lies Camelot, Arthur's magnificent castle. Sometimes it's said to have been built and designed by Merlin, the magician. It's impregnable, it never falls to invaders, having several rings of walls around a central keep with great gatehouses and towers on them. It's got to be a suitable place for a glorious king and his glorious court. So it's rich, it's towering ramparts, it's horses which are clad in marvellous armours and people in beautiful robes, all being very gracious. It's a fabulous place. But separating the legend of Camelot from real history was almost impossible because people weren't writing about events in Dark Age Britain. In fact, there were no history books at all. So there's no record of King Arthur or Camelot at the time. The first mention of Arthur was not until the 9th century, 300 years after he was supposed to have lived, in a book called the Historia Brittonum. Historia Brittonum told a story about a historical Arthur who conducted a series of battles against the Anglo-Saxons and emerged from these battles as the great victor. The Arthur of Historia Brittonum isn't a king. He is given a title, Dux Bellorum, which just means the battle leader or war leader. However, there is no mention of Camelot in the Historia Brittonum. But academics reason that a great war leader must have led from a great castle of some kind. Camelot the Castle doesn't appear until the 12th century when a writer called Geoffrey of Monmouth first mentions it, as well as King Arthur's magnificent round table. He depicted Arthur's court as a place of chivalry where the king treated all knights as equals. Geoffrey of Monmouth concocted his history of the kings of Britain. This has at its centrepiece the life and career of King Arthur. It's the first place where, for example, his wife, Queen Guinevere, is mentioned, his fabulous court, his amazing weapons. Thanks to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the legend of King Arthur and Camelot was born. The idea that Arthur had a great castle as his court became increasingly inextricable from the legend of Arthur and his knights, who could now be seated around a round table in a magnificent castle. But because the King Arthur of legend existed in the Dark Ages, not the Middle Ages, when the texts were written, there was no way of proving through recorded history alone that he actually lived. Sign up now for a free trial and Chronicle fans get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use the code CHRONICLE at checkout. In fact, because recorded history was so scant, it was not until the 20th century that archaeologists began piecing together the story of Dark Age Britain, after the Romans had left. A time of supposed chaos and barbarism. The idea formed that maybe archaeology could offer answers where the history books had failed. And just maybe the remains of King Arthur's great castle could be found, buried deep beneath the ground. It became one of the century's great quests of popular archaeology. When Leslie Alcock was growing up, one of the first to pioneer the new search for what was now being called Arthur's Britain was archaeologist Raleigh Radford. For five years, he excavated around the ruins of Arthur's legendary birthplace and what some believed had been his castle, the Isle of Tintagel in Cornwall. What he found were pottery fragments from half a world away. Fragments that completely contradicted notions of the Dark Ages. Incredible, these fragments were from storage jars that once contained the luxury goods of their day, like wine and olive oil. The importance of the Mediterranean pottery is it actually showed links with the late Roman world. To have this material suddenly coming in and recognised as being from dated contexts in the Mediterranean, it was a bolt of light. Radford's pottery showed that rather than being chaotic, leaderless and isolated, some Dark Age Britons were actually very different. Raleigh Radford, with these fragments of high-status pottery, was demonstrating that far from a lapse into barbarism, a break with Rome, Roman traditions, Roman civilisation and culture had still been continued by the Britons in the face of the invading Saxons. Radford's discoveries raised the extraordinary question. If Dark Age Britons were trading in luxury goods, who would they have been destined for, if not a king or leader of some kind? Could Tintagel have been a receiving port for a leader in the west of Britain, where King Arthur supposedly reigned? Because of Radford's pioneering work, excitement grew that maybe King Arthur really had existed and that archaeology might even turn up something with his name on it. Perhaps the mighty sword Excalibur. Or the remains of the Round Table. Maybe even Camelot itself. Among those profoundly influenced by Radford's discoveries was Leslie Alcock, who in the 1950s was an assistant lecturer in archaeology at Cardiff University. On his first major dig, Alcock stumbled across the Dark Ages almost by accident. He started digging at a site called Dinas Powis, just outside Cardiff, and he did that thinking that he was going to be dealing essentially with an Iron Age site. To his great surprise, Alcock was able to prove the Iron Age hillfort at Dinas Powis had been reoccupied in the Dark Ages, a thousand years later. Alcock's excavation sparked an interest in post-Roman Britain that would define his career. By the 1960s, he became fascinated by new technology and techniques in archaeology that he believed might get to the bottom of the King Arthur myth once and for all. And what better way to start than finding the site of Arthur's legendary castle? But in a country with dozens of claims to be the original site of Camelot, working out where to dig was the biggest challenge of all. For Dad, archaeology started very much before the digging, and what I always found was he was always looking in what was written so much as taking the writings, the historical record, and trying to find out if the historical record is true or the places talked about in the historical record, can we identify them? By examining every mention of the castle in the hundreds of stories that had been written about King Arthur, Alcock gradually picked out the main candidates. In the Middle Ages, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the romance writers had said that Camelot lay in Carlion, in Wales. But that was thought to be based on the presence of a Roman amphitheatre that looked like a giant round table. Another possible candidate was found in Mallory's Mort D'Arthur, published in 1485. Sir Thomas Mallory tried to ground his version of the Arthurian legends, and he's very clear that Camelot is Winchester. Mallory's theory was based on what was thought to be King Arthur's round table, which hangs in the Great Hall in Winchester. Carbon dating has in fact shown it was made for King Edward I, 700 years after King Arthur was supposed to have existed. But it was the writings of John Leyland, antiquary to King Henry VIII, that really piqued Alcock's interest. In 1542, Leyland wrote that a hill next to the village of South Cadbury in Somerset was the location of King Arthur's Camelot. Leyland quite specifically dismisses all other candidates for Camelot except for Cadbury. He picks up the camel name from the local village names, Queen's Camel, places like that. Leyland sees in these very steep slopes and the ramparts there, and the material, he gets almost audiastic about how marvellous and how brilliant it all is. Leyland said generations of locals had called the hill Camelot, a fact that had even drawn the attention of Alcock himself. Alcock's mentor in India, Sir Mortimer Wheeler. They said that their tradition was, they'd been told by their fathers and their grandfathers, that King Arthur used to resort to this place and it was known as Camelot or Camelot. That's the only real evidence we have, a local tradition. It's quite possible, I wouldn't say more than that, that there is a little element of truth in this. Local author Geoffrey Ash, who had written several books on King Arthur, was so convinced that Cadbury could be Camelot, he approached Raleigh Radford, asking him to dig the site. Cadbury is big. The enclosure at the top is 18 acres. Raleigh Radford was very much interested in Arthur, but when I asked him, could we excavate Cadbury, his response was, it's too big, I wouldn't know where to start. But then Radford changed his mind, thanks to the findings of a dog walker on the hill at Cadbury, Mary Harefield. She would go up there to walk her dog. The dog's name is Caesar. And she would walk about in ploughed-up fields there and poke about in the periwinkle umbrella, which is the most elementary form of archaeology. Mary Harefield turned up fragments of pottery that she thought was unusual and presented it to Raleigh Radford. Mary Harefield's fragments were almost identical to Radford's finds at Tintagel. Raleigh Radford, who had a vast experience of excavation throughout the West Country, immediately recognised as what he called Tintagel ware, high-status tableware, high-status storage jars, fragments, from the eastern Mediterranean. So oil, wine and other luxuries had been sent up from Tintagel to Cadbury for someone of high status exactly at the time that King Arthur was supposed to have lived. And these weren't the only clues that made Alcock and Radford want to excavate what could have been King Arthur's castle. Cadbury had clearly been fortified at some time, its banks ridged with earthen ramparts, possibly to protect a large army, just as Arthur was supposed to have led. And it was located just 11 miles from Glastonbury with its Arthurian associations and would have been on the front line in battles with invading Anglo-Saxons pushing west. Even the Ordnance Survey map used to call it Camelot. Radford, Alcock and Wheeler staked their reputations on discovering Camelot at Cadbury. Failure to find it wasn't an option. In 1965, the Camelot Research Committee sat for the first time, tasked with the excavation of South Cadbury. Sir Mortimer Wheeler agreed to be president, offering advice from afar. Wheeler compared their quest to the late 19th century discovery of an ancient city, also thought to be entirely fictitious, until archaeology had proved otherwise. One of the things which Sir Mortimer Wheeler was very, very keen to stress was that it was possible for archaeologists to discover legendary locations. He said if Heinrich Schliemann could find Troy, then why shouldn't English archaeologists be able to find Camelot? The man who had started the search for King Arthur at Tintagel, Raleigh Radford, was the committee's chairman. The last surviving member of the committee today is Arthurian author Geoffrey Ash. Well, I was co-founder and I was secretary. I was the one who wasn't actually an archaeologist. I kept the minutes and things like that and handled the correspondence. Leslie Alcock was the final committee member, selected as the outstanding Dark Age archaeologist of the day. Leslie, because of his reputation as an excavator and his knowledge, because of Dennis Powers, as well as his wider archaeological knowledge, was invited to come on board and appointed as director of excavations. Unlike Radford, Alcock was undaunted by the scale of Cadbury. I think it was the challenge of South Cadbury which is what appealed to Leslie. It's a time of big projects. The BBC were digging Silbury Hill for the first time and South Cadbury was going to be, if he got the money, a big project. But on a hilltop of 18 acres, working out just where to start digging was in many ways more of a challenge than digging itself. Alcock was pioneering in his early use of geophysical surveying in deciding where to excavate. It's often said that Leslie Alcock was one of the rock and roll archaeologists of his day. He was actually at the cutting edge of the white heat of technology. He used every technological means at his disposal to make sure that when they finally got picks and shovels out, they were digging in the right place. Di Morgan Evans was a young supervisor on the search for Camelot who was tasked with using the new technology. One of the clinches there was the use of what became called the soil anomaly detector. And rather than calling it SAD, it was called a banjo. 17. It looked like a banjo. It had a round disc at one end and a box at the other connected by a long metal pole. 25. What you had to do is you laid out 20-metre grids and you walked along calling out measurements at every few intervals. 31. These were then written down by somebody. It became really repetitive, boring. It was awful. But it wasn't just advanced technology Alcock deployed to work out where to dig. He was prepared to humour some of Geoffrey Ash's New Age beliefs. I used dowsing, sometimes called water divining, but it needn't be only water. It can detect other things. Lizzie very generously allowed me to do it. Now, I think this was brave of him because we were working with the media breathing down our necks and it could so easily have been made ridiculous to say that they're digging with dowsing rods. Back at base, Alcock began to analyse the data from his geophysical surveys. He could tell the site was originally Iron Age, but could it have been reoccupied and re-fortified at the time of King Arthur? The banjo readings seemed to suggest so. There was only one way to know for sure. When you're faced with a mass of preliminary evidence, there's only one way to resolve the problems and to sort it out, and that's to excavate. But a dig of this scale needed a lot of money. The Camelot Research Committee had to somehow raise £15,000 to finance the excavation, the equivalent to almost a quarter of a million pounds today. However, the committee knew just using the very word Camelot was guaranteed to get people's attention. In America, Camelot the Musical had been the biggest show on Broadway. President Kennedy's inner circle had been named after Camelot. The name Camelot was on everyone's lips, capturing imaginations on both sides of the Atlantic. Using the name Camelot was incredibly significant. Leslie Alcock was very keen to popularise archaeology and the idea of King Arthur and Camelot might lead to an appreciation of history in these dark ages was important to him as a democratic way of explaining to beyond the elite of academia exactly what he was digging up. With donations from the BBC, the Pilgrims' Trust in America and an exclusive deal with the Observer newspaper, finally the committee raised enough to begin the dig. But none of the archaeologists knew that one of the committee had personally taken a huge financial risk to ensure the excavation could proceed. We were aware of the money constraints we had to spend. Leslie at times would get very twitchy, which doesn't surprise me because I only learnt later on that at one stage he'd actually put up his house as security. Leslie Alcock was a brilliant manager and a brilliant organiser and considering the troubles he was up against, he was a very courageous man. The dig for Camelot took place on the top of the hill and on the southern side, where a major trench was dug from top to bottom. It was a time of really quite high tension because there was a need to deliver. It was a funny mixture of excitement, tension and it used to come away absolutely wrung out and feeling like a wet dishcloth at the end of it. Alcock's team catalogued all their discoveries and hopes were dramatically raised when someone found an artefact in the shape of a letter. Of all the letters it had to be in the alphabet, it was the letter A and that, of course, caused huge excitement at the time. The A had to stand for Arthur, surely proof of Cadbury's claims to Camelot. Alcock was so pleased with the find he persuaded Sir Mortimer Wheeler to come and see Arthur's brooch. But after careful analysis, the A is discovered to be a Roman brooch, dating from before the Dark Ages. It couldn't possibly be Arthurian. Despite the setback, Alcock's team pressed on, their morale boosted by regular appearances of Sir Mortimer Wheeler. He said to Lady Alcock, Dig there! Alcock dutifully did dig there and found things. Sir Mortimer was quite right. But he had an instinct by then, you know. Alcock's other great mentor and collaborator, Raleigh Radford, would regularly visit the dig to check on developments. Radford was sort of almost an amateur archaeologist in his own way, as a gentleman of independent means, although he was taken very seriously in some ways. Raleigh Radford was an inspiration to a whole succeeding generation of archaeologists, and not surprisingly, Leslie Alcock started digging in a lot of the sites that Raleigh Radford had first drawn people's attention to. Another regular visitor to the site was Alcock's son, John. I think South Cadbury was just very special. When you looked at the side of a trench, you're talking layer after layer of history. There's my dad standing beside saying to me, well, that's the medieval layer, that's the Dark Age layer. The dig for Camelot was getting huge publicity. After six weeks of excavations, Alcock appeared on the BBC to explain their progress. Well, we've now reached the end of our work in 1966, and both the traces of buildings that we found and the finds, particularly, give us every reason to believe that we've got a good site here of the 6th century AD in particular. By now, interest in the dig had spread beyond Britain. Alcock needed to raise more money for further excavations and was given a huge boost by an unexpected source. One evening, I was at home, the telephone rang, I picked it up, and the voice said, this is Warner Brothers, where was Camelot? Camelot, the Broadway musical, was being turned into a major motion picture, starring Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave. They wanted this for the film, you see, they were going to put a map in the film. So I said, it was in Somerset. Well, of course I said that. That's my one contribution to Hollywood. For Leslie Alcock, Hollywood's interest was another great marketing opportunity. You're talking about a time when Camelot had come out, when the Arthurian legend was a fascination to everyone, and my dad saw that by pushing that side of it, that this could be Camelot, he would get money to do the serious excavation, and what's more, by going to America, he could tap into a much bigger market with more money. In the summer of 1967, the search for Camelot started up again. Thanks to the film, the committee raised enough funds, principally from America, to continue digging for another three summers. Well, it's the time when flowers are coming from San Francisco. You've got sardine pepper and lowly heart chub band. It's sort of the hippie era. It was all a high degree of interest, with the television cameras and the newspapers, that it was all very, very buzzy. The dig for Camelot went on for a further three years. As it drew to a close in 1970, Alcock made two extraordinary breakthroughs. His team found a late Roman coin of Dark Age origin, buried in the fortifications, that proved that the ramparts dated almost exactly to the time Arthur was supposed to have existed. The Eureka moment, if you like, where they realised that there was some substance to the legends which had got them digging, was discovering this wasn't only an Iron Age Celtic site that maybe some Saxons had lived on top of, but in the actual Arthurian period, had been fortified, had been turned into an actual castle. And if it was a Dark Age castle, who was to say it couldn't be Camelot? But then Alcock made an even more remarkable discovery. The remains of a great hall. A hall littered with Dark Age pot shards, almost certainly used for banqueting by a great ruler at the time of King Arthur. Maybe even Arthur himself. At South Cadbury, there was a gigantic hall, a hall at least 20 feet across, that could easily have fitted something of the size and scale of the Round Table at Winchester, for example. It was proof, surely, that Camelot lay at South Cadbury. Here was my dad saying, actually, I'm the guy with the physical evidence, I've got the great big hall, you know, I've got something that is far more likely to be Arthur's Camelot than anything anyone else has found. If the castle was surrounded by Dark Age fortifications and contained a great leader's feasting hall, it seemed King Arthur really could have ruled from Cadbury. Are you yourself convinced that these were the defences of King Arthur himself? Well, in my most cautious mood, I would only go this far to say that if it isn't Arthur himself, then it's another great military leader so like him that it doesn't make tons of difference. Alcock and his team were triumphant. They basked in the knowledge that they had shown the legend of King Arthur and Camelot to be real after all. Little by little, doubts about the dig at Cadbury started to emerge. Academics began to question Alcock's methods and his evidence. There's nothing at South Cadbury which would make one believe that there was an Arthur in the 6th century than one did without it. In terms of finding evidence for a historical Arthur, it completely failed. Every generation of archaeologists challenges those that went before it. They challenge their assumptions and they challenge their findings. That's the discipline of archaeology. Believing that a war leader called Arthur led the Britons in the heroic defeat of the Anglo-Saxons in the 6th century is akin to believing that an Englishman in a dinner jacket called James Bond defeated the Soviet Union in the late 20th century. The evidence for King Arthur's Great Hall on Cadbury was highly dubious at best, they said. It wasn't big enough for a round table at all. It gets called the Great Hall, but, to be honest, it's actually quite a small hall. An awful lot is placed on the shoulders of a really rather modest building. Not only was there no archaeological evidence, even the historical texts, which Alcock had based his research on, were questionable, to say the least. The new sceptics dismantled the written foundation stone of Alcock's Arthurian claims. Rather than being a history, they said, the Historia Brittonum, which first mentioned Arthur, was a work of 9th-century propaganda and had its chronology of the Dark Ages all wrong. David Dunville's work in the 1970s completely discredited most of the evidence that Alcock and others supporting the idea of a historical Arthur had used. Obviously, this had a pretty negative impact on the credibility of Alcock's work. Some hinted that Alcock had committed historical heresy. He had tried to give credibility to works of fiction rather than establish the truth. Even the very idea of Arthur, the heroic Briton, battling invading Anglo-Saxons, was misconceived, they said. Since the 1970s, the relationship between the Anglo-Saxons and the Britons has been increasingly reassessed, and we would now tend to think of that relationship as much more complicated and nuanced, if you like. Instead of continuous warfare and hostility, some Britons and some Anglo-Saxons lived peacefully side by side. By the end of the 1990s, no serious historian dared associate the Dark Ages with a real King Arthur again, including Alcock himself. He had the great sense, rare among myth hunters, to accept that he was probably wrong. I'm not aware of my dad taking criticisms hard. He always saw there was another argument. He always had some doubts as to whether Arthur existed. He always was prepared to accept there were other sides to the argument. Despite his mistakes at Cadbury, in 1973, Alcock became the first professor of archaeology at Glasgow University and excavated Dark Age hillforts in Scotland with huge success. Alcock's legacy was not only furthering our understanding of Dark Age Britain, but also the lasting impact he had on the archaeologists he taught. Without a doubt, Alcock's work encouraged an interest in Dark Age archaeology among a succeeding generation of archaeologists, most of whom are active today. Leslie was a great teacher, a great academic, and I think he deserves more recognition than probably he gets. And I think in due course his contributions will be fully recognised, not least amongst the hundreds of students that he trained and sent out into the archaeological world. We can't underestimate Leslie Alcock's contribution to the world of archaeology. This was a remarkable step change in the way that archaeology and the public interacted, and it's a legacy that we're still living under. As for South Cadbury, the hillfort is now barely even signposted, home just to cows and walkers. Its association with King Arthur, once again, buried deep beneath the ground. And although he may not have found Camelot, Alcock had discovered the fortified remains of a great leader. You certainly didn't find the Camelot of Romance as you found it in the Middle Ages. We did find that the hill had been a great fortified place at exactly the right time. And we now know South Cadbury hillfort was one of Britain's largest and most significant ancient settlements, occupied for 4,000 years, from Neolithic times until the Middle Ages. Leslie Alcock's excavation at South Cadbury was in many ways a great success. Yes, it found an outstandingly useful sequence of occupation from a British hillfort. And where does that leave the legend of King Arthur? Was he just a myth after all? I personally think that Arthur did exist, that as a dux bellorum, he was a great military leader. Where he was, when he was, I can't be sure. I think we can say that there was a real person. He is called King of the Britons. Every nation needs its foundation myth, and Britain's is the legend of King Arthur and Camelot, a legend that lives on.