![]() ![]() ![]() And a nearby cave is said to harbour the sleeping monarch and his knights until the day they are needed by the nation, a local variant of the same piece of folklore that was to spawn Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen trilogy. ![]() ![]() Tennyson came here too, in 1856, apparently writing part of the epic Idylls of the King in the town’s Hanbury Arms. The location is steeped in history and archaeology with its impressive Roman ruins, and its later associations – it’s the site where Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century chronicle of British monarchs, Historia regum Britanniae, places the court of King Arthur, and where, some 350 years on, Thomas Malory staged the legendary figure’s coronation in Le Morte D’Arthur. Finally, I’ve arrived in the small Welsh town of Caerleon. Coming off the M4 into the urban sprawl of Newport, the ancient Roman fortress I’m aiming for is surprisingly difficult to locate, with counterintuitive road signs seemingly sending me the wrong way before, at last, there’s a gap in the incessant straggle of houses and I’m crossing a muddy-banked tidal river. ![]()
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