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Camelot is firmly established in Arthurian legend, either as Arthur's capital city or, in stories closer to the peripatetic style of kingship of the earlier Middle Ages, the city where he holds his court most often and on the most important occasions.1 There have been attempts to identify a real Camelot, but no place in Britain is known ever to have had that name. Most scholars today feel that efforts to identify Camelot are futile.2 It is not included in some surveys of Arthurian place names that find space, for instance, for Celliwig, Arthur's obscure court somewhere in Cornwall in Culhwch ac Olwen? One distinguished scholar has celebrated this indeterminacy, saying that a Camelot located nowhere in particular 'can be anywhere ... a state of mind, a source of inspiration, an idea'.4 True though that is, I shall argue that, despite the many unsatisfactory identifications of Camelot that have been offered during the past 800 years, a neglected piece of evidence makes it possible for the first time to propose a location that could plausibly be that of a real Camelot.
First, however, some parameters. Arthur is either a historical figure who, in Britain at some time about ad 500, quickly attracted many mythological attributes, or a mythological figure who in the same period quickly attracted many historical attributes. In early stories about him, the members of his warband, his wife, other people associated with him, and objects like his ship and his sword are also mixtures of the historical and the mythological. Any of these components may be authentically historical, accidentally distorted, deliberately fraudulent, pastiche, or even burlesque, like Clust mab Clustfeinad ('Ear son of Hearer'), one of Arthur's retainers in Culhwch, who, seven fathoms under the earth, could hear an ant stirring from its bed fifty miles away in the morning.5 Arthurian geography exhibits a comparable variety. None of the handful of documents that might testify to the existence of a historical Arthur associates him unequivocally with an identifiable part of Britain; the battles in the Arthurian chapter of Nennius' Historia Britonnum in particular, which might be thought to be the most promising component of this evidence, have been located in almost every region of Roman Britain by one competing theory or another.6...