Castle Hill with Arthur folklore passes into public ownership

Four villagers who bought a hill which, according to local legend, is where King Arthur married Guinevere want to turn it into a nature reserve.

The four paid £86,000 for woodland at Castle Hill at Knucklas, near Knighton, Powys, and intend to allow archaeologists to excavate the site.

Folklore says that Guinevere married Arthur on the hill's grassy slopes.

King Arthur' hill nature plans

BBC News - Jan 9, 2009

King Arthur's 'wedding site' sale
01 Nov 08 | Wales

However academic research shows the links to Arthur is folklore and probabally recent folklore at that:

Legendary Castle Hill near Knighton up for sale
WalesOnline - Nov 4, 2008

But Dr Ian Hughes, a lecturer in mediaeval Welsh prose at Aberystwyth University, said he has researched the marriage claim at Castle Hill and has struggled to find a written reference to it.

“My problem is that nowhere in the Mabinogion does it say here is the place where Arthur and Guinevere were married,” he explains.

“We hear that Guinevere is Arthur’s wife. But it doesn’t say that he married her in any particular place.

“The closest thing I can find is in the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

“He refers to a marriage but mentions Cornwall.

“We would be talking about the year 1138. And we know that Guinevere was the daughter of a giant, Gorgyrfan Gawr.

“But that doesn’t mean that she was a giant too.

“She is described as a most handsome and beautiful maiden, despite her father being an ugly brute.”

Dr Hughes explained that many communities throughout history have tended to “relocate” events to do with the legend of King Arthur to improve the kudos of their own area.

“King Arthur was a great legendary leader – and I mean legendary, who ruled the island fairly and was viewed as a paragon of virtue.

“As a result of representing everything that a good king should be, everybody wanted a piece of him.

“And there are lots of places across Britain and Wales that claim he was theirs.

“In Edinburgh for example there is an extinct volcano known as Arthur’s Seat, in Cornwall they say he held court there, but in Wales we say it was in Caerllion.

“And Camlan, the scene of Arthur’s last battle, was located between Machynlleth and Dolgellau, according to the locals living there.

“In many cases this sense of community relocation is like propaganda; it is used to build up the importance of an area.”

Book examines Geoffrey of Monmouth as a historian

Past Masters: John Burrows' History of Histories
TIME - Jan 9, 2008

Past Masters: John Burrows' History of Histories

By DAVID WORTH Wednesday, Jan. 09, 2008

The writing of history is one of the great legacies of the ancient Greeks, and its earliest masters, Herodotus and Thucydides, are as central to the foundations of Western civilization as Homer, Socrates and Sophocles. In more modern times, multivolume sagas of crumbling empires, explosive revolutions and nations nudging toward greatness were huge best sellers, making historians like Edward Gibbon, Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle as well known as Stephen King and John Grisham are today.

But the fact that this needs stating, or that we must intermittently re-emphasize history's relevance to understanding ourselves, points to a problem that has hounded the discipline in recent years — its tendency toward clubby academic isolation. A fine antidote to this trend is John Burrow's A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, an ambitious and accessible account of the historian's craft over the last 2,500 years....

He goes on to discuss "the radical and pervasive" impact of the Bible on history — for example, in the writings of the 6th century French Bishop Gregory of Tours, whom he dubs "Trollope with blood." Equally intriguing is Burrow's discussion of the secular historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, a fabricator who claimed that his 12th century account of King Arthur was in fact a translation of an early work in Welsh — one that nobody else has ever been able to unearth. Geoffrey's "pseudo history," writes Burrow, dressed up myth as fact, thereby launching Arthur and his knights as potent symbols of Britain's "emerging ethos of chivalry."

Another book on real Arthur

Startling Discoveries in Britain May Be Linked to King Arthur's Camelo...
International Business Times - Dec 5, 2008

Recent discoveries in Britain may provide evidence of King Arthur and his legendary Kingdom of Camelot. Stone carvings and rock art found in an exposed seaside cave and on other sites in the Borders area could have been created as memorials to King Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, and the Knights of the Round Table.

(PRWEB) December 5, 2008 -- Author Kaye D. Hennig and photographer Terrance Hennig have discovered and photographed ancient art - unusual, sculptured images that they believe can be connected to a historical King Arthur and his lost kingdom. Just released by Design Magic Publishing, their book King Arthur Lord of the Grail is a fascinating coffee-table style book that relates the story of the couple's search for the truth about Camelot. The book contains photographs of giant sculptures that the couple believes were created as a record of a historical dark-age people who became known as the Arthurians. The photographs reveal royal figures and helmeted faces, images carved in stone that appear to be portraits of real individuals. According to author Kaye Hennig, "This is a book that could turn legend into history!"

The couple's explorations and research began over a decade ago as a search for physical evidence of a legendary kingdom. In the end, it became something else … the author's spiritual quest to understand the beliefs of the ancients and to discover truths that lay hidden within the secrets of the Grail. The couple researched sites in Britain and in France, searching the locations that they believed might contain evidence of the culture of these ancients. Ultimately, they discovered a lost world … one where ancient queens were revered in hidden chapels, where Grail priestesses kept sacred secrets, and where worthy individuals sought to complete a Grail quest.