Searching For Arthur

STEPHEN ROBERTS investigates Somerset’s ties with Arthurian legend.

- Stephen Roberts

“VICTORY swung first to one side and then to the other, until the battle of Badon Hill, when the Britons made a considerable slaughter of the invaders.” So wrote Bede in the early eighth century, describing an event that occurred about two centuries earlier, when Roman legions had departed Britain and these islands fell prey to marauding Anglo-Saxons, keen to fill the power vacuum.

Mons Badonicus (its Latin name) or Mount Baden, was one of those battles lost to us in the mists of time. Fought between the Celts (the Ancient Britons) and the invading Anglo-Saxons, Baden is oft represented as the last stand of Ancient Briton, when the Celts inflicted a crushing defeat on the Anglo-Saxons, halting their westward expansion for a generation.

If you believe the writings of Welsh cleric Nennius in the ninth century, one of the British leaders at Badon was King Arthur, and the battle one of 12 he allegedly fought against the Saxons. Welcome, King Arthur, Britain’s number one myth. Nennius doesn’t actually describe him as a king, but a leader instead, something repeated by the 10th century Welsh Annals, which date Badon to around 516-518 AD. What we have here is a generalissimo.

But where was Badon? No one knows for sure, though a West Country battlefield is favoured, with Wiltshire and Dorset sites posited. Somerset boasts a potential location, too: Little Solsbury Hill, near Bath. A Somerset Badon would be apt, for it is in our county where the so-called Dark Ages are being slowly enlightened by archaeologists’ discoveries. As a lost period emerges, I went to Little Solsbury to investigate.