(FAINT SHOUTING)
Every year, in a field in Cornwall,
they gather to commemorate the last battle of the greatest of all British heroes.
Arthur! Arthur!
Rex Britannia!
The tales of Arthur have got it all -
love and courage, betrayal,
and the ultimate spiritual quest.
This is a search for the legend of King Arthur,
a journey through Celtic Britain, France and Ireland.
It's a story of ancient alchemy and medieval mysticism.
The tale of a lost golden age, which one day will return.
And, more than that, Arthur's story - so the Celtic bard said -
was the ''matter of Britain''.
The legend of King Arthur has been told by poets and filmmakers for a thousand years.
How the pure knighthood was destroyed by adulterous love
and the horror of civil war.
Merlin! Where are you?
It has immortal characters and imperishable symbols -
the Holy Grail, the round table and the magic sword, Excalibur.
Behold the sword of power! Excalibur!
0ur search for the legend of Arthur begins not in the Isle of Avalon or in Camelot,
but here among the canal barges in an industrial suburb of 0xford.
It's rare that you can pinpoint the exact time and place
in which a myth gets created or reshaped by a great storyteller,
but, in this case, we can.
This, believe it or not, is the most important place
in the creation of the myths of King Arthur.
Come and have a look at this. Isn't that brilliant?
This is all that's left of the 12th-century abbey
on Osney Island outside Oxford.
It was here in 1129 that a young Welsh cleric...
..became the most influential, the most brilliant
and the most imaginative creator of the Arthur myth.
His name - Geoffrey of Monmouth.
It was right on this spot that Geoffrey created an imaginary history of the Celts
as the Celts might have dreamed their history could be.
Here, for the first time, are Merlin and Guinevere
and the wicked Mordred, the betrayer of Arthur.
Here's the prototypes of Excalibur and Camelot and Avalon,
and at the centre of it, Arthur himself - ''the once and future king''.
But when you think of Geoffrey's Arthur, don't think history, think storytelling.
This is a kind of dazzling medieval ''infotainment''
in comparison with which mere historical fact is simply boring.
Now Uther Pendragon was Lord of Britain. He held a great feast.
Among those present was Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall,
with his wife, Ygerna - the greatest beauty in all Britain.
When the king cast his eyes on her, he fell madly in love.
Her husband, discovering this, retired angrily from court.
He put his wife into the castle of Tintagel by the sea shore -
a place of the greatest safety.
Then King Uther said to the wizard Merlin,
''My passion for Ygerna is such that if I do not possess her,
''I will go mad with desire.''
Merlin said, ''I have a magic potion
''that will make you the exact likeness of her husband and you can go to her.''
The king drank the potion and he went to Tintagel and he was let in.
The king stayed all night in Ygerna's arms and he made passionate love to her,
for she was deceived by Merlin's magic.
And that was the night Arthur was conceived.
Great myths need great locations
and the Dark Age fortress of Tintagel in Cornwall simply begs to be included.
Here, Geoffrey heard folk tales about a Celtic hero - Arthur -
who would one day return.
(MAN) We know that Geoffrey was writing in the 1130s,
picking up stories from around the country,
and that he was somehow induced to visit Tintagel.
His description, when we get to the question of Arthur's conception by trickery,
makes it perfectly clear that he was here.
We're told is Arthur's conceived here. The assumption is he's born here.
After that, in ''The History of the Kings of Britain'',
Arthur has nothing more to do with Tintagel, but that was enough to spark it off.
Somehow, a whole series of beliefs is brought together by this genius romancer,
this Jeffrey Archer of our period.
He was. It's a wonderful book, the ''Historia'' and it's brought here.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
(W00D ) But Geoffrey's Arthur wasn't just a good story, it was a political weapon.
His prophecy that Britain would rise again could be used against English oppressors.
The Celts needed a hero and Geoffrey provided him.
(MAN) Arthur represents the Celtic spirit for the bards and the people of Cornwall.
Therefore, when we all cry ''Nyns yw marow maghytern Arthur'',
it's expressing the fact that the Celtic spirit is not dead in this country.
(W00D ) Every year, the Celtic bards meet in Bodmin,
speaking the ancient language of Cornwall.
(SPEAKS CORNISH)
Swearing on Arthur's Excalibur their independence from the English.
''Nyns yw marow maghytern Arthur'' - King Arthur's not dead.
At least not in spirit.
The sword represents the spirit of Arthur, who defended Britain
as we diminished westward in the onslaught of the Anglo-Saxons thousand of years ago.
(STIRRING SINGING)
(W00D ) But the idea of Arthur as a resistance hero against the English
was far older than Geoffrey.
In the Roman Empire, Britain was the jewel in the crown.
When the Romans left, it was coveted by the barbarians, especially the Saxons -
ancestors of today's English who sailed across the sea from Germany.
According to later legend, the Saxon invaders were first welcomed
by the British ruler, the tyrant Lord Vortigern.
The Anglo-Saxon tradition was that the first landing of the Saxons
was at a place called Ebbesfleot, which people say is Ebbsfleet.
- Where's Ebbsfleet, then? - Ebbsfleet is behind the power station.
(LAUGHTER)
It all looks like some nondescript backwater of 21st-century Britain, doesn't it?
But this is the scene of perhaps the most momentous events that ever took place
in the history of the British Isles.
We're in one of the channels between the Isle of Thanet and the mainland of Kent.
According to legend, it was here, in the year 449 AD,
that three ships came sailing up
under the command of two pagan Saxon chieftains.
Their names were Hengist and Horsa - ''the stallion'' and ''the horse''.
Hengist and Horsa, so the legend goes,
were hired as mercenaries by Lord Vortigern to fight for him.
Unwisely, perhaps, Vortigern gave them land as a reward.
But the Saxons soon turned against him and took more for themselves.
A foothold in Britain that would become England.
In the heart of rural Kent,
this re-enactment group are recreating that ancient English past.
They're building a Saxon long hall.
For Kim Siddhorn, it really is a dream come true.
Isn't that amazing?
- So it's like the great medieval barns. - It is.
- It's the same idea. - The woodwork is very similar.
The hall will be accurate in every historical detail,
but it will also embody an English myth.
- Where's the fire? - There, basically. It will be a long fire.
Perhaps 12 feet long or so.
For many English people, that myth arouses emotions
as strong as those felt by the Celtic bards in Cornwall.
But then, the English were the winners.
''Aethelstan cyning...
''eorla drythen,
''beorna beag-giefa and his brothor eac, Edmund aetheling...
''On thys ig-land...''
This poem was written over a thousand years ago in 0ld English.
''Sweordes ecgum siththan Engle and Seaxe...''
It boasts of the coming of the Saxons and their conquest of the Britons.
''Britene sohton...eard begeaton.''
You can almost hear it in modern English.
Since the Angles and Saxons came over across the broad waves -
''ofer brad brimu''.
Sought out Britain - ''Britene sohton''.
And took the earth - ''eard begeaton''.
Amazing, isn't it?
England. England is an idea that has lit the world for a thousand years.
The land holds the bones of those who died for it.
England is still an idea and an ideal
and is held high in the hearts of many of us.
I speak for ordinary people as well as nuts like us that seek to recreate this period.
It was in response to such tales of Saxon victories
that the Celts created their own hero.
Arthur, the lord of battles,
fought for the kings of Britons against the Saxon invaders.
He fought 12 battles and carried the image of the Virgin Mary on his shoulders
and our Lord Jesus Christ in his heart.
In his 12th battle on Mount Badon,
960 Saxons fell in one day from one charge
and no one struck them down but Arthur alone.
And in all his wars, he was the victor.
By the time that was written in the 9th century,
the Celts - or the Welsh as the English call them -
had been pushed to the corners, railing against the man who had betrayed Britain.
(MAN) Vortigern, having fled from the Saxons
that he'd invited here to help him with his battles,
was advised to build a castle in one of the strongest places in Britain, and came here.
Unfortunately, every time his workmen returned to their labours,
they found the stones were scattered and they weren't able to build.
His advisors, his counsellors, told him that there was a curse
that made it impossible to build anything.
And the only way to break that curse was to find a golden-haired boy
whose mother could confirm that there never was any father,
and to kill the boy and sprinkle his blood around the hill.
(W00D ) The boy led Vortigern to the top of the hill here at Dinas Emrys.
Under a stone pavement, he revealed a great jar.
Inside were two dragons - one white and one red.
The dragons fought each other until the red one triumphed and the white one fled.
It was a prophecy, the boy said.
0ne day, the Celts would overthrow the Saxons, a hero would appear
and Britain would rise again.
(NEALE) This is supposedly the spot where it happened.
When the archaeologist that was working here in the 1950s dug, he did find a pavement
exactly where you'd expect to find it.
I don't suppose it's possible this really was the fortress of Vortigern?
That's another suggestion.
Maybe there was a fortress here. Maybe there are dragons still here!
Spared from death, it was the blond boy who prophesied the return of Arthur.
And the boy's name? Myrddin. 0r, as we know him, Merlin.
But to the Welsh, Myrddin is also one of their first bards
and today's Welsh poets still claim his inspiration.
The image of Merlin we have today is a bit like Gandalf in ''The Lord of the Rings'',
but who is the first Merlin?
He was a court poet in the north of England when the whole of Britain was British-Welsh.
He becomes a seer, but not a wizard.
He doesn't go changing people into frogs,
but he has this power to see things that other people can't.
He's more of a prophet than somebody who pulls rabbits out of a hat.
Yeah, that's right.
The oldest surviving poetry talks about him with his piglet.
He speaks to his piglet, like a familiar.
And there are long pieces of verse,
half of which are factual and historic
and half are just ranting about different things.
- These survived? - Yes.
- Can you do them? - We can do some of them.
- Can we refer to our book? - Yes, of course.
(SPEAKS WELSH)
He says, ''I am Merlin, the king of prophets and I loudly...''
(GLASS BREAKS)
''..I loudly proclaim.
''Since I am Merlin, prophetic words pour from my mouth like the best wine.''
(SPEAKS WELSH)
Which is, ''I know the depth of every lake, the number of a bird's feathers,
''why fish go unshod.''
(SPEAKS WELSH)
What does that mean?
It means, ''I know how high a star is and I know how wide heaven is
''and I know why minds are troubled.''
So it was through poetry and prophecy that Arthur first came into being.
But it was Merlin's magic that made him not just a warrior, but a king.
On Christmas Eve, when the nobles of England came out of church,
they saw a great stone with an iron anvil into which a sword was fixed
and on the sword blade, inlaid in gilt, it said,
''Whoever takes this sword out of the stone shall be king.''
And all the worthiest lords tried and no one could move it.
Young Arthur happened to ride up on his horse and saw the stone
and he leaned over in his saddle, took the sword by the hilt and drew it out.
The Archbishop said, ''Here is the man that God has chosen, as you have all seen.''
And that was the way Arthur became king.
And that story shows how Arthur begins to attract other tales, like a magnet.
- Hi, Neil. - Hello, Michael.
- So this is it? - A simple charcoal furnace we're using.
Take a seat. That's it. Just go left and right.
The sword in the stone is one of the most famous of the tales of Arthur.
But this part of the legend may come from much more ancient times.
Back in the Bronze Age, this was an absolutely magical thing
as well as a dramatic technological innovation.
The smith is somebody who transforms base metals
into something beautiful and extraordinary.
Neil Burridge is a bronze caster
and he's worked out the ancient technique of casting bronze swords in a stone mould.
We'll get rid of some of this charcoal at the top.
- Can you see? - Yeah. Wow. Look at it inside.
- We go this way. - OK.
Then we pour.
There we go.
- Right. You can talk. - Is that it?
That's it.
You can tell it's set now because it's not moving.
Let me use this to push the middle and you can tell it's set.
So we're going to lay it down...
..and try to encourage the moulds apart.
Wow.
So we've got a nice casting.
Look at that. That's absolutely amazing. It is magic.
So there's the sword in the stone.
It's amazing how quickly you've got a weapon.
It's almost instant.
That technique is from the Bronze Age, about 1,000 BC,
but you can see how a process like that
was the kind of thing remembered by the bards and the poets and handed down.
Maybe the story of the sword in the stone
is a hangover of that ancient past.
By the late 12th century, Arthur had become a rallying cry for Welsh revolt
and the English began to see him as a threat.
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth,
Arthur's last resting place was the Isle of Avalon - Glastonbury.
Lady Chapel starts at that arch there, does it?
And here, the English king, Henry II, decided to prove that Arthur was dead
and could never come back.
- And how many paces? - About 14, 15.
14 or 15 paces.
Clues in medieval chronicles allow us to piece together what really happened
on Britain's first archaeological dig.
Nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14...
- Round about here is the tomb? - Yeah.
When they started digging, they put up a pavilion around the spot
so people couldn't see.
They screened it off like a police investigation!
- Just like a police investigation. - Gerald of Wales said they dug 16 feet.
What did Gerald say they found at the bottom?
A large hollowed-oak coffin
with two skeletons - one of Arthur, one of Guinevere.
This is the page from ''Camden's Britannia''
and this is his drawing of the cross.
''Hic jacet inclitus Rex Arturius
''in insula avalonia.''
- Is that suspicious? - I think it's very suspicious.
It's talking about the famous King Arthur,
but he doesn't become famous until after his death.
And the lettering's wrong. It's 12th century.
- Is it? - Yes. They've given themselves away.
So there you are.
The 1191 excavation of King Arthur's body here at Glastonbury,
without a shadow of doubt, was a fraud.
But it sparked off an explosion of interest in the legend.
Given a fine new tomb in Glastonbury, Arthur became a huge tourist draw.
Meanwhile, his legend went international.
Henry II's French wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine,
hired French poets to write new Arthur myths.
Their Arthur was a courtly hero of the Age of Chivalry.
A Welsh guerrilla was now head of the most glamorous court in Europe.
And what better place to imagine it?
Towering ramparts, fairy-tale turrets, monks and nuns, knightly halls.
This is how the medieval romances picture the world of King Arthur.
The Bretons are also Celts, cousins of the Cornish and the Welsh.
Bertrand Vanton does tours of the Breton Arthurian sites.
We're heading to a little island over there - Tombelaine.
- How far is it? About a kilometre? - No, it's about three kilometres from here.
It's really tricky. You think it's so near. It's distant.
Here in France, Arthur became a medieval superman,
who slew monsters, rescued maidens and fought giants.
So the stories of Arthur and Merlin,
they are well-known here in France and Brittany?
There is a British legend that is about Tombelaine.
Arthur came here and killed the giant. Is this story also here?
Yes. That was an ogre who came from Spain.
An ogre who came from Spain? Wow.
And he used to live on this island of the Mont St Michel.
Arthur was on his way to Rome.
He heard there was a princess who was in trouble with that ogre,
so he decided to come to the rescue.
Arthur killed the ogre,
but he was too late. Princess Héléne was already dead.
Breton legend says he buried her here on the island.
Here we are.
There's Mont St Michel.
And so Brittany became another Arthur country.
And what a human thing it is in places of such breathtaking beauty
to create wonderful stories and tie them to real landscapes.
That's how myths grow - crystallising our dreams.
And it was here in France that medieval dreamers
now made the tale of Arthur and his knights
a focus for the spiritual values of the age.
But of all the writers that reinvented, re-imagined Arthur in the 12th century,
the greatest was Chrétien de Troyes.
Chrétien took the legend onto a whole new level of romance and chivalry
and spiritual quest.
And in his last work, he added an amazing twist -
a wonderful theme which has captivated the world ever since.
A young knight, Sir Perceval, arrives, tired and hungry, at a magical castle.
From here to Beirut, says Chrétien, a more beautiful castle could never be seen.
But a dark threat of war and suffering hangs over the land.
Perceval is led into the hall and there is seated, as if for a feast.
And he watches in silence as a vision unfolds.
(SOFT SINGING)
A boy came in holding a white lance and he passed in front of the fire.
Everyone in the hall saw a drop of blood issue from the tip of the lance
and the red drop ran right down to the boy's hand.
Now a girl came in, fair and comely,
and between her hands she held a grail.
And when she carried the grail in,
the hall was filled with a light so brilliant
the candles lost their brightness -
as do the moon or stars when the sun rises.
And Perceval went to sleep longing to know the meaning of this vision
and who was to be served from the grail.
(W00D ) When Perceval woke, the castle was empty and the grail was gone
and a quest began that has fascinated writers and filmmakers ever since.
A grail is a serving dish, but it soon became ''the'' Grail -
the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper.
It's a sweet place.
The tale invented by Chrétien came back to England and spread to the Welsh borders.
- Am I on ''Candid Camera''? - Not yet!
Here, if you want to find the Holy Grail,
the key, or rather the keys, are kept in the Hodnet village shop.
- Hi, Janice. This is Michael. - Nice to meet you. Sorry to disturb you.
- Can we borrow the key for the church? - You certainly can.
It's a bit complicated. That's the outer door - the little door in the corner.
That's the outer door upper lock.
That's the inner door upper lock and the inner door bottom lock.
The Grail story appears in a 13th-century Shropshire legend
and it resurfaces with a Victorian antiquarian, Thomas Wright.
He left a series of clues which finally brought you to this church.
Graham Phillips has spent years untangling the riddle.
He thinks that Wright left clues to the whereabouts of the Grail
in the west window of the village church.
There it is.
The four figures represented are supposed to be Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
although John quite clearly is a woman in this representation,
perhaps Mary Magdalene.
With the cup called the Marian Chalice,
the chalice that was supposed to have been used by Mary Magdalene...
At the Crucifixion, she holds the cup up to collect the blood of Christ.
So what led you to this?
A family called Fitz Warine possessed a cup which they claimed was the Holy Grail.
Their descendants were called the Vernons
and their descendant was Thomas Wright, the man who had this window put in.
So the plot thickens here.
He claims to have the very same cup, but he's got no son to hand it on to...
No story has generated so many conspiracy theories.
But that's a testimony to the seductive power of the myth and its symbols.
If one of those statues is important,
it must be the one above St John's head - the eagle statue.
The Shropshire Grail mystery leads to Hawkstone Park.
It's an 18th-century fantasy garden
which has now become another Arthur country.
0nly this one was made to order.
In this man-made grotto, the mischievous Victorian, Thomas Wright, left a final clue.
Right.
So these are the two statues.
This one here, the lion statue,
and the other one over here is the actual eagle statue...
You can see its feet here, this is its breast, and its head would have been here.
It was in the base of this -
it had been moved down the cliff there and it fell to the bottom.
In the base of it there was a little hollow and that's where the cup was found.
The cup that was found in the statue...
..it's quite small. In fact, when you see it...
Wow. Can we bring it into the light?
When you see it, it doesn't look much different to an egg cup.
- But... - God, how interesting.
It was taken to the British Museum where they identified it
as a 1st-century Roman scent jar.
No?
It can't be proved that it's that, but that's certainly the style of it.
How like medieval people we still are.
The power of the tale is so great that we will it to be true.
But, despite all the seekers from the medievals to ''The Da Vinci Code'',
the Grail is pure myth.
A symbol created by Chrétien and the poets who came after him
of something that can never be possessed... but for which we must still strive.
A symbol, perhaps, of the human quest itself.
The Holy Grail is not the only symbol of Arthur which was created to meet our needs.
In medieval England, they thought Camelot was Winchester,
and here they have Arthur's round table.
It's the ultimate symbol of equality among men of power,
copied in parliaments round the world - the United Nations itself.
It was made for Edward I in 1290
after he'd reburied Arthur's bones in a marble tomb in Glastonbury.
This is the best way to view it!
So it's a fake but, of course, it's also real.
Now we're up here you can make out the names of the heroes.
- Galahad, Lancelot du Lac... - Gawain.
- That's Gawain? - Perceval.
- This is Tristram. - Tristram d'Orleans.
Gareth, Bedivere, and all the odd ones...
200 years later, the table was repainted by another would-be Arthur - Henry VIII.
- This was painted when? - Some time after August 1516.
Henry has come here - first visit as king -
saw it was in bad condition and immediately issued a writ
to repair the hall and paint the table.
This is one of the world's greatest symbols, but it's changed its symbolic meaning.
What was Henry's interest in Arthur?
Henry wanted to be elected Holy Roman Emperor.
So he has a King Arthur painted with his own face,
so this is clearly a descendant of Arthur who rules the round table in this life.
- Arthur reborn - Arthur reborn. Rege vivus.
And so Geoffrey of Monmouth's prophecy had come true.
Henry VIII was a Tudor. The Tudors were Welsh.
The old monarchy of Britain had been restored.
The myth of Arthur had become a parable of Britain itself,
a dream of what Britain had been and could be once more -
a paradise land whose golden age might still come again.
But only a few years later, it was Henry himself who smashed that old world forever.
When Henry fell out with the Pope and made England Protestant,
he ordered the demolition of England's old medieval Catholic culture.
And here in Glastonbury, Arthur's Isle of Avalon,
they felt the full fury of the Reformation.
It's like the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Cultural Revolution in China.
Among the casualties, the bones that lay in the black marble tomb in the nave.
Arthur and Guinevere, whoever they really belonged to, gone forever.
And with that, you might have thought, the myth of Arthur had run its course.
The Tudor revolution would lead us into the modern world.
The age of angels and grails had gone forever.
But, like every nation, the British still needed their myths.
Myths of identity, myths of state.
Visitors think this is medieval, but actually it's...
Well, they know that it represents... British history.
In the 19th century, the Houses of Parliament were rebuilt,
decorated with the tales of Arthur and his knights.
This is our legend and myth which the Victorians thought was most appropriate.
In her robing room, when Queen Victoria dressed for great affairs of state,
she did so under the gaze of her mythic predecessor.
What they wanted in this room was some kind of aesthetic
which represented the merits and the virtues of kingship, of monarchy.
And through Arthur, England would engage again with her lost past.
For his Arthurian epic, the Victorian's favourite poet, Alfred Tennyson,
joined forces with the pioneer of photography, Julia Margaret Cameron.
The same tales that had held the medievals spellbound
now caught the mood of the Victorian age.
The ''once and future king'' had returned.
- This is the original volume? - Yes.
- And the original signature. - There's the man himself.
Gosh, so these are all original prints.
What's so striking about them is how much they correspond
to our image of what the Arthurian period looked like today.
DW Griffith, the great American silent film maker,
was hugely influenced by Mrs Cameron.
So you have her sense of lighting and dress going straight into early Hollywood.
There's a direct line through this and silent movies?
- Yes. - They're such wonderful images.
Look at this. Lancelot and Guinevere.
There's a very melancholy strain in all this, isn't there?
This is the height of the Victorian Empire. How do you explain this?
You have as Arnold said, ''The sea of faith retreating''.
You've got Darwin developing the Theory of Evolution.
Not yet published, but in the air, so to speak, intellectually.
This sense that Victorian certainties were ebbing away as they were at the high point.
It's a conscious turning one's back on what's become the modern world.
(W00D ) Freedom fighter, superman, Christian hero
and now head of the first British Empire.
A tired giant, whose noble ideals slip through his fingers.
But a figure who united the British in a mystical vision of their past.
A fantasy, but somehow, like all the best myths, still true.
(TANN0Y) A no-smoking policy is now operated on all interior accommodation.
So you see this great mass of legends and stories about King Arthur
grew and was added to over hundreds of years.
Responding to the times,
to needs that were political and cultural and even emotional.
You can see too that most of them have no origin in real historical events.
They're the product of the wonderful imagination of the storytellers.
But is that all there is to it?
Where did the first Arthur storytellers get their tales?
How far back do they really go?
To find out in the islands of Britain today, there's only one place you can go.
To Ireland.
I went down into County Cork with Professor Dathi 0'Hogain
to find one of only two storytellers still alive
who can recite the Gaelic hero tales of ancient Ireland.
Very nice to meet you. I'm Michael.
- (INDISTINCT) - Michael Wood.
(FIDDLE PLAYS)
Padraig, the fiddle player, is 90 years old
and the tale teller himself - Sean - a sprightly 80.
(SPEAKS GAELIC)
This story tells of Finn McCool and the young warriors, the Fianna.
A tale with uncanny echoes of Arthur -
the magic sword, the cup that brings eternal life.
(APPLAUSE)
How did you first hear these stories?
- I learned them from the old people. - The old people?
The only thing we have in this world is our way of thinking.
There is nothing stronger than that.
When that story is written in about the 16th century,
the writer was using older motifs and older Fianna materials.
When you hear Sean, you're listening to a voice that goes back for centuries.
When you listen to Sean telling the Fianna story,
you get an impression of what it was like in Wales from the 9th to the 11th century
before the Arthurian tradition became part of the literature of Europe.
When I'm telling those stories, I'm living them.
So through Sean, we can trace elements of the tale back 1,500 years or more.
But are they just fantasy?
Could there even have been a real Arthur, as the Welsh believe?
It's only a short hop of about 15 miles at its shortest
between County Antrim in Ireland and the islands of Scotland.
This stretch of water has been a passageway for migrants and seamen and saints,
along with stories and legends, for thousands of years.
This is the Isle of Iona.
It's the burial place of the kings of the Scots,
Gaelic speakers who came here from Ireland in the Dark Ages.
It was here that an Irish saint, Columba, came in the 6th century
and converted the Scots to Christianity.
- So this is a 19th-century edition, is it? - Yeah.
He came from what we would now call Northern Ireland,
and this area of Scotland was already colonised by his people.
They were having a hard time
because the king of the Picts was giving them a hard time.
They maybe sent for Columba as an important person from their own tribe
to help them counter this pressure from the Pictish king.
Columba's was a brutal age of battles between Scots, Picts and Saxons.
His life was written down in one of Britain's earliest biographies.
(WOOD ) This is the crucial bit here.
It's about the sons of King Aidan, who's really the first king of the Scots,
who emerges from the shadows as a real person.
And it's about a prophecy that St Columba makes.
''Nunc barbari in fugam vertuntur,
''Aidanoque quamlibet infelix, tamen concessa victoria est.''
King Aidan's troops win the battle, but it's an unhappy victory.
303 heroic warriors die in the battle.
But even more important, in the same battle...
''Miatorum superius memorato in bello, trucidati sunt...''
..were killed the two sons of Aidan.
Echodius, and the eldest son...
Arturius.
Arthur.
Just like the Holy Grail, we search for Arthur, willing him to be real.
But there is a real Arthur, who died in a tragic battle in the 6th century,
somewhere north of the Roman wall.
Was it his name that was handed down by the bards to all those later storytellers?
And never was there seen a more doleful battle in any Christian land.
They fought all day long and never stinted
till all the noble knights were laid to rest in the cold earth.
They fought till it was near night
and then King Arthur spied the traitor, Sir Mordred,
and he ran toward him crying, ''Traitor! Now is your death day come!''
And King Arthur smote Sir Mordred
with a thrust of his spear right through his body.
When Sir Mordred felt he had his death wound,
he pushed himself with his last strength up to the burr of King Arthur's spear...
and he smote his father Arthur with his sword over the side of his head.
Then Sir Mordred fell stark dead to the earth
and the noble Arthur fell in a swoon.
''Ah!'' he said. ''Now I have my death.''
The Welsh chronicles say that Arthur's last battle was at a place called Camlann -
a Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall called Camboglanna.
- It's so beautiful. - We're now climbing the wall.
- Oh, yes. So we're now inside...? - You'd now be inside the fort.
In Major Johnstone's potting shed were relics from the end of the Roman world.
This is amazing. Absolutely amazing.
The fort was occupied by a team of soldiers...
The fort has never been excavated but we know it was occupied in the 6th century,
when the legend of Arthur may have begun.
And, even more extraordinary,
the Welsh bard, Myrddin - the first Merlin -
sang his heroic songs about this very area.
Yeah. Look here. Another hero figure.
This looks like some kind of altar
with a hero or divine figure with some kind of club.
It could be a war god.
I don't know whether you know this story,
but in the Annals of Wales, a 10th-century manuscript in the British Library,
it has a note speaking of a battle at a place called Camlann,
which, if it's a Roman place name at all, must be Camboglanna.
- Right. - In which Arthur and Medrawt died.
How very interesting.
Yes, I remember that from what one knows of Arthur,
but I never connected it might be here.
So here at last, perhaps, is a tangible link with an Arthur of history.
There doesn't have to be a historical prototype,
but maybe this is the connection.
As he lay dying, Arthur said to Sir Bedivere,
''Here, take Excalibur. Go with it to the lake and throw my sword in the water.''
But Sir Bedivere couldn't bring himself to throw such a wonderful thing away
and twice he hid Excalibur and came back and said he had thrown it in the water.
''What did you see?'' said Arthur.
''I saw nothing but the ripple of the waves'', said Bedivere.
''Ah, traitor untrue!'' said King Arthur.
''Now you have twice betrayed me.''
(W00D ) The third time, Bedivere threw the sword into the lake
and an arm appeared, grasped the sword and took it back into the water,
safe for the day the king will return.
And so, over the centuries, King Arthur became a symbol of their histories
for the peoples of the islands of Britain.
And, in that sense, as with all great myths and legends, he's still alive today.
As Sir Thomas Malory said, more than 500 years ago,
''Some men say that King Arthur is not dead,
''but had by the will of our Lord Jesus Christ into another place.
''And men say he will come again and win the Holy Cross.
''I will not say that this shall be so,
''but on his tomb is written this verse:
'''Here lies Arthur, once and future king'.''