Scholars find fabled Round Table

Press, 8 March 1989, Page 11

Scholars find fabled Round Table

By

TONY VERDON

in London King Arthur’s legendary Round Table has been found on the banks of the Carron River, near Stirling, in Scotland, says Burke’s Peerage. The discovery was made by two American scholars, after studying land titles, Arthurian sites in Scotland, and eighteenth century writings. They have also concluded that the Table was in fact a rotunda as the word “rounde” has in the past been incorrectly translated as an adjective instead of a noun. One of the scholars, Professor Norma Goodrich, a leading authority on King Arthur, last year confirmed that Camelot was almost certainly in Scotland, three miles from Ayr at Greenan Castle.

The findings have the backing of the publisher of Burke’s Peerage, Mr Harold Brooks-Baker. “The ancient remains are almost certainly beneath slag waste on the banks of the Carron River,” he told the “Daily Telegraph” newspaper. “But up to $560,000 will be needed to excavate the stones to turn legend into reality.” The other scholar involved, Mr Robert Mitchell, has spent the last six years studying the subject of the Round Table. He has concluded that it was a rotunda with stone sections measuring four and a half feet by one foot. Many of the stones which formed the rotunda 1500 years ago were used in 1743 to repair the mill dam on

the Carron River, he says. The present owner of the site, a Bath manufacturing company, has funded several days of core sampling, to confirm that the old river course was filled with slag waste. Mr Mitchell has now found an entrance to the underground culvert system. He says this is “an essential factor in determining the location of the remains of the Round Table.” Mr Brooks-Baker says the scholastic breakthrough in proving that Scotland was the headquarters of King Arthur, needed only the uncovering of the Round Table to convince the world that other Arthurian myths connecting the monarch with England and Wales were fallacious.