King Arthur's Round Table

Strange that only a week ago I mentioned King Arthur as yesterday I had an email from Switzerland, where there is to be an exhibition called King Arthur and his Knights from April through to October 2008. The exhibition is to be a joint venture between Schweizerisches Institut für Kinder- und Jugendmedien (the Swiss Institute for Children's and Youth Media) SIKJM and Museum Aargau and will be shown simultaneously in two venues: Castle Lenzburg and Castle Hallwyl in Kanton Argau, Switzerland.

The organisers wrote to me, asking to use the photograph shown here of the henge earthworks known as King Arthur's Round Table at Eamont Bridge near Penrith in Cumbria. It appears on my Stone Circles web page (using web space no longer available). I took the photograph on slide film in 1985 and over the 22 years of its existence I'm afraid it has attracted a great deal of dust and grime. Anyway I cleaned it up as best I could and sent the largest scan I could and for good measure sent some more recent photos taken in better weather which were a bit sharper.

We think of King Arthur and his knights as riding around in medieval armour, because the main stories about him were written (and the majority made up) some 600 or so years after he would have lived and they were a bit - how should I say - modernised by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to extol the virtues of 12th aristocracy. He introduced most of the characters that we associate with Arthur, including Merlin, Uther and Ygerne and even the associations with Tintagel and Avalon. A bit like historians of the future taking the film Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves as the basis for their understanding of 13th Century England...