THE ROUND TABLE

Evening Star, Issue 22798, 5 November 1937, Page 11

THE ROUND TABLE

A GIANT EARTHWORK ENIGMA OF CUMBERLAND King Arthur’s Round Table is the traditional name (it goes back at least to the sixteenth century) of a curious round earthwork on the borders of Cumberland and Westmorland (writes Professor B. G. Collingwood in the ‘Manchester Guardian’). South of Penrith the main London toad crosses the Earnout, and a few •uivired yards further on a branch'leaves it tunning westward to Pooley Bridge and Ullswater. In the fork between these two roads, opposite the Crown Hotel, is the Round Table. It consists of an oval platform about 150 ft across; round this runs a ditch, 40ft wide; round that, again, a mound evidently made of the soil that has been dug from the ditch. On the south-east is an sntrance, consisting of a gap in the mound and a causeway across the ditch; on the north-west there was once another, as we know from old sketch plans, but it has been obliterated by making the Pooley Bridge road, at the end or the eighteenth century. ANTIQUARIES AT A LOSS. The age and purpose of this earth work have long been a puzzle to antiquaries. ■ In the eighteenth century sports were held there with shooting at the butts and so forth; and this, together with a faint and jesemblance to an amphitheatre, led the imaginative Stukeley to conceive it as a place where the ancient Bn tout, celebrated some sort of games. Others, with an eye .to the Arthurian connection, explained it as a tilting ground for knights; others again as a place where Norse settlers fought thnr “ holm-gang ” duels. The be it plan of it and the best description were made in 1889 by the late C. W. Dymond; ami it is curious to see how, when he came to discussing the problem of age and purpose, Dymond entirely failed to improve on his predecessors. “ Very good orators, o hen they are out, will spit”; and archaeologists in the like cose hunt for parallels. They exist; but they are rare, and hardly more comprehensible than the Bound Table itself. There is a group of three on Thornborough Moor, in Yorkshire, and two more on Hutton Moor, five miles away from them. There is another, on a gigantic scale known as Durrington Wall, near Amesbury, in Wiltshire. These are the only true parallels. None of them has been excavated. Nobody knows how, old any of them is, or what purpose it served. AVEBURY AND ARBOR LOW. Remoter parallels can be found in a group of monuments, similar so far as earthwork is concerned but having a circle of standing stones round the edge of the central platform. Avebury is the greatest and best-known example; but others occur in Cornwall (the Stripple Stones, on Bodmin Moor), Derbyshire (Arbor Low and the Bull Bing), and Orkney (the Ring of Prodgar). Arbor Low may be taken as the typical site. It is very like the Bound Table, both in shape and in size, but upon its central platform there lie, now fallen, a number of what were once tall stones standing in a ring_ and in the middle of some others which look as if they had once formed a kind of dolmen. Excavations here at the be-

ginning of the present century failed to explain the purpose of the monument, but dated it to the Bronze Age. The discovery and excavation of Woodhenge 10 or 12 years ago revolutionised the study of prehistoric stone monuments by showing that similar monuments were sometimes constructed of timber. This suggested a formula for the Round Table. As Woodbenge is to Stonehenge, so is the Round Table to Arbor Low. The suggestion was put forward at the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian Society’s meeting in 1936, and the decision was made there and then to test it by excavation. POSTS TO SUPPORT A ROOF. Three weeks’ work in July. 1937, were devoted to. searching the Round Table for holes in which wooden posts might have stood. The search was embarrassingly fruitful. Nearly 160 postholes were found, and probably far more remain as vet undiscovered. A circle of large posts, it is evident, ran all round the central platform, spaced at 20ft intervals. Twenty feet inside this circle was another, concentric with it, made of numerous small posts; 20ft inside that a third. From the southeast entrance a 20ft road, flanked by double rows of small posts, ran to the centre. This entrance road, with its flanking posts, was picked up again outside the ditch and traced underneath the surrounding mound. We had already, before making that discovery, found that the prehistoric work was of two periods; this now proved that the mound and ditch belonged to the second period and that in the first period there had been either a much slighter earthwork or none at all. The size and distribution of the post-holes show that they held not huge, free-standing columns of wood, but small posts connected by walls and roofs; in fact, a vast circular hut such as may be seen, to-day in many parts of Africa. This, surrounded by a verandah or portico supported on larger posts and probably by a small ditch and mound, was the first-period building, COMPOSITE BUILDING.

After its ‘decay it was replaced by a composite building; a small hut iii the centre, a roofed porch at the entrance, a few great standing stones round the edge, and a much larger ditch and mound. The second building was certainly a tomb temple of the Bronze Age; we found the place where a body had been cremated. The first, therefore, was probably a monument of the same kind. Much remains to be done next year. But this year’s work has given us a prehistoric monument of an entirely new kind ; something which cannot, like Woodhenge and its kindred, be ex--plained as a mere systetn of posts, but was certainly roofed over its whole extent. The discovery will add a new and important factor to the problem of the stone circles; and incidentally by showing that a hut surrounded with a verandah was a type of temple known in the Bronze Age, it may serve to explain the origin of the ” Romana-Cel-tic temples,” those square buildings, each surrounded by a verandah, which became the ordinary type of temple during the later years of the Roman Empire in Britain and Gaul.