– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

[Music]

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According to legend, he was Britain's 's

greatest king.

The name of King Arthur resonates very

deeply with the British.

King Arthur led his knights at the round

table from Camelot, a vast spectacular

castle built on a

hill. But was the legend of Camelot

based on reality or simply a myth?

It's a very fuzzy and vague place. It's

it's it's glorious and it's glamorous.

If King Arthur really did

exist, then the remains of his castle

Camelot should lie buried somewhere in

Britain. But

where? In the 1960s, a team of

archaeologists used the latest

technology to try to prove the legend

was real. They were led by Leslie Orch,

a brilliant, energetic showman who

brought modern archaeology into the

mainstream. And in 1966, Leslie Or was

one of the rock and roll archaeologists

of his day.

Orcock identified a hill in Somerset

close to Glastenbury as the most likely

location for

Camelot. But could he really prove it

was the site of King Arthur's

castle? If he succeeded, it would be one

of the most important archaeological

discoveries of the 20th century.

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The man who would lay claim to Camelot

was born in Manchester in

1925. As a boy, Leslie Olcock was a

brilliant student, determined to better

himself both mentally and

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physically. Dad seems to have been full

of energy and drive. I found in his

cycling diaries that he used to cycle 30

miles a day before going to school in

the mornings. Um and and you see that

intellectually as well.

He won a scholarship to Manchester

Grammar and then another to Braznos

College,

Oxford, but his education was

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interrupted. During the Second World

War, Olco was posted to India where he

joined the seventh Girka rifles.

He became fascinated by the

subcontinent's history and

archaeology. He learned that the past

isn't just what people write in

textbooks, but often something tangible,

hidden in the

ground. In India, he would eventually go

on to work for one of Britain's most

flamboyant

archaeologists, Samortma Wheeler.

The story I'm telling you is not

fantasy. Wheeler's role was quite

crucial in a way. One of the newspaper

reporters said if he hadn't turned into

a great archaeologist, he'd have been a

matinea idol. Moreover, we can relate

this evidence was an amazingly

charismatic character

which it is agreed it's towards the end

of his active life. But nonetheless, um

boy could he still carry it on and um I

mean terrible old goat still.

Dan was invited by Samotomo Wheeler to

work at Mahenjidaro. This incredibly

important dig into the center of the

indust civilization and I think he was

taken on for a lot for his language

skills, for his ability to get on with

the locals as much for his

archaeological skills.

In

1946, Orco returned to a very different

Britain to the one he had left.

Post war, with its empire crumbling, the

country was shattered, hungry, and in

need of a

lift. A country desperate for new

heroes. In the early 1950s, morale was

boosted by the British expedition's

conquest of

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Everest and Roger Banister breaking the

4-minute mile.

reminders that Britain could still be

great. He'd obviously used up his last

ounce of energy, but what an achievement

for Banister and Britain.

But there was one hero from the past

people turn to more than any other.

The modern growth of Arthur is something

that happened after the second world war

when people were thinking more about na

national roots how they came to be so

and so

forth. There was a resurgence of

interest in the Arththeran legends. I

think primarily because King Arthur was

seen as a figure who united his country

in order to fight off Germanic invaders.

King Arthur was known as the once and

future king. Legend said he would rise

again and restore Britain to

greatness. Part of the story is that

Arthur is not really dead. He's in the

aisle of Avalon or he's in a cave of

sleep or some somewhere. And the idea

grew up that somehow other Arthur would

return and there would be a new golden

age in

Britain. Such was the fascination with

King Arthur. Postwar historians and

archaeologists wanted to prove the

legend was based on facts, not just

myth, and that Britain's very identity

was forged under the blade of the mighty

king.

King Arthur was supposed to have ruled

in the dark ages around 500

AD. He was said to have been born on the

Cornish aisle of Tintagel under the

watchful eye of the wizard Merlin.

The story goes that Arthur became the

true king of the Britain as only he

could draw the sword Excalibur that had

been set in

stone. He valiantly defeated invaders

who came across the sea from

Europe and in one battle singlehandedly

killed 960 men.

He unified his country from waring

factions. He defended it against

invaders. He led a band of knights, the

Knights of the Round Table, who were

famous for their adventures, for finding

the Holy Grail and rescuing damsels in

distress. And at the heart of the legend

lies Camelot, Arthur's magnificent

castle.

Sometimes it's said to have been built

and designed by Merlin the magician.

It's impregnable. It never falls to

invaders. Having several rings of walls

around a central keep with great gate

houses and towers on

them. It's got to be a suitable place

for a glorious king and his glorious

court. So it's rich. It's towering

ramparts. It's horses which are clad in

marvelous armors and people in beautiful

robes all being very gracious. It's a

fabulous

place. But separating the legend of

Camelot from real history was almost

impossible because people weren't

writing about events in dark age

Britain. In fact, there were no history

books at all. So there's no record of

King Arthur or Camelot at the

time. The first mention of Arthur was

not until the 9th

century, 300 years after he was supposed

to have lived in a book called the

Histori Bretonum.

Historia Bretonum told a story about a

historical Arthur who conducted a series

of battles against the Anglo-Saxons and

emerged from these battles as the great

victor. The author of Historia

Breton isn't a king.

He is given a title duk bellorum which

just means the battle leader or war

leader. However, there is no mention of

Camelot in the

historium. But academics reasoned that a

great war leader must have led from a

great castle of some kind.

Camelot the castle doesn't appear until

the 12th century when a writer called

Jeffrey of Monmouth first mentions

it as well as King Arthur's magnificent

round

table. He depicted Arthur's court as a

place of chivalry where the king treated

all knights as

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equals. Jeffrey Monmouth concocted his

history of the kings of Britain. This

has its centerpiece the life and career

of King Arthur. It's the first place

where for example his wife Queen Gwennov

is mentioned, his fabulous court, his

amazing weapons.

Thanks to Jeffrey of Monmouth, the

legend of King Arthur and Camelot was

born.

The idea that Arthur had a great castle

as his court became increasingly

inextricable from the legend um of

Arthur and his knights who could now be

seated around a round table in a

magnificent castle.

But because the King Arthur of legend

existed in the dark ages, not the Middle

Ages, when the texts were written, there

was no way of proving through recorded

history alone that he actually lived.

In fact, because recorded history was so

scanned, it was not until the 20th

century that archaeologists began

piecing together the story of dark age

Britain. After the Romans had left, a

time of supposed chaos and

barbarism, the idea formed that maybe

archaeology could offer answers where

the history books had failed. And just

maybe the remains of King Arthur's great

castle could be found buried deep

beneath the ground. It became one of the

century's great quests of popular

archaeology. When Leslie Olock was

growing up, one of the first to pioneer

the new search for what was now being

called Arthur's

Britain was archaeologist Raleigh

Radford.

For 5 years, he excavated around the

ruins of Arthur's legendary birthplace

and what some believed had been his

castle, the aisle of Tintagel in

Cornwall. What he found were pottery

fragments from half a world away.

Fragments that completely contradicted

notions of the dark ages.

Incredibly, these fragments were from

storage jars that once contained the

luxury goods of their day, like wine and

olive

oil. The importance of the Mediterranean

pottery is it actually showed links with

the late Roman world. To have this

material suddenly coming in and

recognized as being from dated contexts

in the in the in the Mediterranean, it

was a bolt of light.

Radford's pottery showed that rather

than being chaotic, leaderless, and

isolated, some dark age Britain were

actually very different.

Raleigh Radford with these fragments of

high status pottery was demonstrating

that far from a lapse into barbarism, a

break with Rome, Roman traditions, Roman

civilization and culture had still been

continued by the Britain in the face of

the invading Saxons.

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Radford's discoveries raised the

extraordinary question. If dark age

Britons were trading in luxury goods,

who would they have been destined for,

if not a king or leader of some

kind? Could Tintagel have been a

receiving port for a leader in the west

of Britain where King Arthur supposedly

reigned?

Because of Radford's pioneering work,

excitement grew that maybe King Arthur

really had existed and that archaeology

might even turn up something with his

name on

it. Perhaps the mighty sword

Excalibur or the remains of the round

table, maybe

even Camelot

itself.

[Music]

Among those profoundly influenced by

Radford's discoveries was Leslie

Olcock, who in the 1950s was an

assistant lecturer in archaeology at

Cardiff

University. On his first major dig,

Orcock stumbled across the Dark Ages

almost by accident.

He started digging at a site called

Dennis Pace just outside Cardiff. Um,

and he did that as a um, uh, thinking

that he was going to be dealing

essentially with an Iron Age

site. To his great surprise, Orco was

able to prove the Iron Age hill fort at

Dennis Pace had been reoccupied in the

dark ages a thousand years later.

Or's excavation sparked an interest in

post Roman Britain that would define his

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career. By the 1960s, he became

fascinated by new technology and

techniques in archaeology that he

believed might get to the bottom of the

King Arthur myth once and for all.

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And what better way to start than

finding the site of Arthur's legendary

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castle. But in a country with dozens of

claims to be the original site of

Camelot, working out where to dig was

the biggest challenge of all.

For dad, archaeology started very much

before the digging. And what I always

found was he was always looking in um

what was

written. So much is taking the writings

which the historical record and find

trying to find out if the historical

record is true

or the places talked about in the

historical record. Can we identify

them? By examining every mention of the

castle in the hundreds of stories that

had been written about King Arthur, Orco

gradually picked out the main

candidates. In the middle ages, Jeffrey

of Monmouth and the Romance writers had

said that Camelot lay in Calleon in

Wales, but that was thought to be based

on the presence of a Roman amphitheater

that looked like a giant round

table. Another possible candidate was

found in Mallalerie's Mort Darthur

published in 1485.

Sir Thomas Mallerie tried to ground his

version of the Arththeran legends and

he's very clear that Camelot isn't

Winchester. Mallerie's theory was based

on what was thought to be King Arthur's

round table which hangs in the great

hall in Winchester.

Carbon dating has in fact shown it was

made for King Edward I 700 years after

King Arthur was supposed to have

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existed. But it was the writings of John

Leland, antiquaryy to King Henry VIII

that really piqued Orcock's interest.

In

1542, Leland wrote that a hill next to

the village of South Cadbury in Somerset

was the location of King Arthur's

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Camelot. Leland quite specifically

dismisses all other candidates of

Camelot except for Cadbury.

He picks up the camel name from the

local village names, Queens camel, place

like

that. Leland sees in these very steep

slopes and the ramparts there and the

material. He gets almost about how

marvelous and how brilliant it all is.

Leilen said generations of locals had

called the hill

Camelot a fact that had even drawn the

attention of Orcock's mentor in India

Samortma Wheeler.

They said that their tradition was

they've been told by their fathers and

their grandfathers that King Arthur used

to resort to this place and it was known

as Camelot or

Camelot. That's the only real evidence

we have a local

tradition. It's quite possible I won't

say more than that that there is a

little element of truth in

this. Local author Jeffrey Ash, who had

written several books on King Arthur,

was so convinced that Cabri could be

Camelot, he approached Raleigh Radford,

asking him to dig the

site. Kenbury is big. The enclosure at

the top is 18 acres.

Rally Bradford was very much interested

in Arthur, but when I asked him, "Could

we excavate Cadbury?" His response was,

"It's too big. I wouldn't know where to

start." But then Ratford changed his

mind. Thanks to the findings of a dog

walker on the hill at Cadbury, Mary

Hairfield. She would go up there to walk

her dog. The dog's name was Caesar, and

she would walk about in plowed up fields

there and poke about with the the peril

of an umbrella, which is the most

elementary form of archaeology.

Mary Hairfield turned up fragments of

pottery that she thought was unusual and

presented it to Riley Radford.

Mary Hairfield's fragments were almost

identical to Radford's finds at

Tintagel. Raleigh Radford, who had a

vast experience of excavation throughout

the West Country, immediately recognized

as what he called tintagelware,

um high status table wear, high status

storage um jars, fragments from the

Eastern Mediterranean.

So oil, wine, and other luxuries had

been sent up from Tintagel to Cadbury

for someone of high status exactly at

the time that King Arthur was supposed

to have

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lived. And these weren't the only clues

that made Orcock and Radford want to

excavate what could have been King

Arthur's castle.

Cadbury had clearly been fortified at

some

time, its banks riged with earthn

ramparts, possibly to protect a large

army, just as Arthur was supposed to

have

led. And it was located just 11 miles

from Glastonbury with its Arthurian

associations and would have been on the

front line in battles with invading

Anglo-Saxons pushing

west. Even the ordinance survey map used

to call it Camelot.

Radford, Olock, and Wheeler staked their

reputations on discovering Camelot at

Cadbury. Failure to find it wasn't an

option.

[Music]

In 1965, the Camelot Research Committee

sat for the first time, tasked with the

excavation of South

Cadbury. Samortma Wheeler agreed to be

president, offering advice from afar.

Wheeler compared their quest to the late

19th century discovery of an ancient

city also thought to be entirely

fictitious until archaeology had proved

otherwise. One of the things which uh

Samortum Wheeler was very very keen to

stress was that it was possible for

archaeologists to discover legendary

locations. He said, "If Hinrich Schlean

could find Troy, then why shouldn't

English archaeologists be able to find

Camelot?" The man who had started the

search for King Arthur at Tintagel,

Raleigh Radford, was the committee's

chairman.

The last surviving member of the

committee today is Arthyan author

Jeffrey Ash.

I was co-founder and I was secretary. I

was the one who wasn't actually an

archaeologist. I kept the minutes and

things like that and handled the

correspondence. Leslie Orcock was the

final committee member selected as the

outstanding dark age archaeologist of

the day.

Leslie because of his reputation as an

excavator and his knowledge because of

Dennis

Pace as well as his wider archeological

knowledge um was was invited to come on

board and appointed as director of

excavations.

Unlike Radford Orch was undaunted by the

scale of Cadbury.

I think it was the challenge of South

Cabbury which is what appealed to

Leslie. It's a time of big projects. Um

the BBC were digging Silbury Hill for

the first time. And South Cabbury was

going to be if he got the money a big

project. But on a hilltop of 18 acres,

working out just where to start digging

was in many ways more of a challenge

than digging itself.

Olco was pioneering in his early use of

geoysical surveying in deciding where to

[Music]

excavate. It's often said that Leslie

Orcott was on the rock and roll

archaeologists of his day. He was

actually at the cutting edge of the

white heat of technology. He used every

technological means at his disposal to

make sure that when they finally got

picks and shovels out, they were digging

in the right

[Music]

place. Die Morgan Evans was a young

supervisor on the search for Camelot who

was tasked with using the new

technology.

[Music]

One of the the clinches there was the

use of what became called the soil

anomaly detector. Um, and rather than

calling it SAD, it was called a banjo.

17. It looked like a banjo. It had a

round disc at one end and a box at the

other connected by a long metal pole.

45.

What you had to do is you laid out 20 m

grids and you walked along calling out

measurements at every in few intervals.

31.

These were then written down by

somebody. It became really repetitive,

boring. It was

awful. But it wasn't just advanced

technology deployed to work out where to

dig. He was prepared to humor some of

Jeffrey Ash's new age

beliefs. I used

dowsing, sometimes called water

divining, but it needn't be only water.

It can detecting other

things. Lizzie very

generously allowed me to do it. Now, I

think this was brave of him because we

were working with the media breathing

down our necks and it could so so easily

have been made

ridiculous to say that they're dealing

with dowsing

[Music]

rods. Back at base, Orco began to

analyze the data from his geoysical

surveys.

He could tell the site was originally

Iron Age, but could it have been

reoccupied and refortified at the time

of King

[Music]

Arthur? The banjo readings seem to

suggest

so. There was only one way to know for

sure. When you're faced with a mass of

preliminary evidence, there's only one

way to resolve the problems and to sort

it out, and that's to excavate.

But a dig of this scale needed a lot of

money. The Camelot Research Committee

had to somehow raise

£15,000 to finance the

excavation, the equivalent to almost a

quarter of a million pounds

today. However, the committee knew just

using the very word Camelot was

guaranteed to get people's attention.

[Music]

In America, Camelot the musical had been

the biggest show on

Broadway. President Kennedy's inner

circle had been named after

Camelot. The name Camelot was on

everyone's lips, capturing imaginations

on both sides of the Atlantic.

Using the name Camelot was incredibly

significant. Leslie Or was very keen to

popularize archaeology and the idea of

King Arthur and Camelot might lead to an

appreciation of history in these dark

ages was important to him as a

democratic way of explaining to beyond

the elite of academia exactly what he

was digging up.

With donations from the BBC, the

Pilgrims Trust in America, and an

exclusive deal with the Observer

newspaper, finally the committee raised

enough to begin the

[Music]

dig. But none of the archaeologists knew

that one of the committee had personally

taken a huge financial risk to ensure

the excavation could

proceed. We were aware of the money

constraints we had to spend. Leslie at

times would get very twitchy. Um which

doesn't surprise me because I only

learned later on that he at one stage

he'd actually put up um uh his house as

security.

Messi Orlock was a brilliant manager, a

brilliant organizer and considering the

troubles he was up against, he was a

very courageous man.

[Music]

The dig for Camelot took place on the

top of a hill and on the southern side

where a major trench was dug from top to

bottom.

It was a time of really quite high

tension because there was a need to

deliver. It was a funny mixture of

excitement, tension, and used to come

away absolutely rung out and and feeling

like a a wet dishloth at the end of it.

[Music]

Orchok's team cataloged all their

[Music]

discoveries. And hopes were dramatically

raised when someone found an artifact in

the shape of a

letter. For all the letters it had to be

in the alphabet, it was the letter A.

And that of course caused huge

excitement at the

time. The A had to stand for Arthur.

Surely proof of Cadbury's claims to

Camelot. Orco was so pleased with the

find, he persuaded Samortma Wheeler to

come and see Arthur's brooch.

But after careful analysis, the A is

discovered to be a Roman brooch dating

from before the dark

ages. It couldn't possibly be

[Music]

Arthurian. Despite the setback, Orco's

team pressed on. The morale boosted by

regular appearances of Samortima

Wheeler.

He said to Leslie Orcock, "Dig

there did dutifully did dig there and

found things." So a was quite right. But

he had an instinct by then, you know.

Orcock's other great mentor and

collaborator, Raleigh Radford, would

regularly visit the dig to check on

developments.

[Music]

Bradford was sort of almost an amateur

archaeologist in his own way as a

gentleman of independent means, although

he was taken very seriously in some

ways.

[Music]

Riley Radford was an inspiration to a

whole succeeding generation of

archaeologists and not surprisingly

Leslie Or started digging at a lot of

the sites that Riley Radford had first

drawn people's attention to.

Another regular visitor to the site was

Orok's son John.

[Music]

I think South Cabbury was just very

special. When you looked at the side of

a trench, you you're talking layer after

layer of

history. There's my dad standing beside

saying to me, "Well, that's the medieval

lair. That's the dark age lair."

The dig for Camelot was getting huge

publicity. After six weeks of

excavations, Orco appeared on the BBC to

explain their progress.

Well, we've now reached the end of our

work in 1966. And both the traces of

buildings that we found and the finds

particularly give us every reason to

believe that we've got a good site here

of the 6th century AD in particular.

By now, interest in the dig had spread

beyond

Britain. Orco needed to raise more money

for further excavations and was given a

huge boost by an unexpected source.

One evening I was at home, the telephone

rang, I picked it up and a voice said,

"This is Warner Brothers. Where was

Camelot?

[Music]

Camelot, the Broadway musical, was being

turned into a major motion picture

starring Richard Harris and Vanessa

Redgrave.

They wanted this for the film. You see,

they were going to put a map in the

film. So, I said it was in Somerset.

Well, of course, I said that.

That's my one contribution to Hollywood.

For Leslie Olcock, Hollywood's interest

was another great marketing

opportunity. You're talking about a time

when Camelot had come out, when the

Arththerian legend was a fascination to

everyone. And my dad saw that by pushing

that side of it that this could be

Camelot, he would get money to do the

serious excavation. And what's more, by

going to America, he could tap into a

much bigger market with more money.

[Music]

In the summer of 1967, the search for

Camelot started up

again. Thanks to the film, the committee

raised enough funds, principally from

America, to continue digging for another

three summers.

[Music]

Well, it's the time when um flowers are

coming from San Francisco. You've got um

Sergeant Pepper and Lowly Heart Tub

Band. It's sort of the hippie

era. It was all high degree of interest

and with the television cameras and the

newspapers and that it was all very very

buzzy.

The dig for Camelot went on for a

further 3

years. As it drew to a close in 1970,

Orcock made two extraordinary

breakthroughs. His team found a late

Roman coin of dark age origin buried in

the fortifications that proved that the

ramparts dated almost exactly to the

time Arthur was supposed to have

existed. the Eureka moment, if you like,

where they realized that there was some

substance to the legends which had got

them digging was discovering this wasn't

only an Iron Age Celtic site that maybe

some Saxons had lived on top of, but in

the actual Arththeran period had been

fortified, had been turned into an

actual castle.

And if it was a dark age castle, who was

to say it couldn't be

Camelot? But then Olock made an even

more remarkable

discovery. The remains of a great

hall. A hall littered with dark age

potshards almost certainly used for

banqueting by a great ruler at the time

of King Arthur.

maybe even Arthur himself.

At South Cadbury, there was a gigantic

hall, a hall at least 20 ft across that

could easily have fitted something of

the size and scale of the round table at

Winchester, for example.

It was proof surely that Camelot lay at

South Cadbury. Here was my dad saying,

"Actually, I'm the guy with the physical

evidence. I've got the great big hall.

You know, I've got something that is far

more likely to be Arthur's Camelot than

anything anyone else has found."

If the castle was surrounded by dark age

fortifications and contained a great

leader's feasting hall, it seemed King

Arthur really could have ruled from

Cadbury.

[Music]

Are you yourself convinced that these

were the defenses of King Arthur

himself? Well, in my most cautious mood,

I would only go this far to say that um

if it isn't Arthur

himself, then it's another great

military leader so like him that it

doesn't make tons of difference.

[Music]

Olco and his team were

triumphant. They basked in the knowledge

that they had shown the legend of King

Arthur and Camelot to be real after all.

[Music]

[Music]

But little by little, doubts about the

dig at Cadbury started to

emerge. Academics began to question

Orcock's methods and his evidence.

There's nothing at South Cabbury which

would make one believe that there was an

Arthur in the sixth century than one did

without

it. In terms of finding evidence for a

historical

Arthur, it completely

failed. Every generation of

archaeologists challenges those that

went before it. They challenge their

assumptions and they they challenge

their findings. That's the discipline of

archaeology.

Believing that a war leader called

Arthur led the Britain in the heroic

defeat of the Anglo-Saxons in the sixth

century is akin to believing that an

Englishman in a dinner jacket called

James Bond defeated the Soviet Union in

the late 20th century.

[Music]

The evidence for King Arthur's great

hall on Cadbury was highly dubious at

best. They

said it wasn't big enough for a round

table at

all. It gets called a great hall, but to

be honest, it's actually quite a small

hall. An awful lot is placed on the

shoulders of a really rather modest

building.

Not only was there no archaeological

evidence, even the historical texts,

which Orc had based his research on were

questionable, to say the

least. The new skeptics dismantled the

written foundation stone of Arththerian

claims. Rather than being a history,

they said the Histori Brettonum, which

first mentioned Arthur, was a work of

9th century propaganda and had its

chronology of the dark ages all wrong.

David Dunville's work in the

1970s

completely discredited most of the

evidence that Orcock and others

supporting the idea of a historical

Arthur had used.

Obviously, this had a pretty negative

impact on the credibility of Orcock's

work.

Some hinted that Orchok had committed

historical heresy. He had tried to give

credibility to works of fiction rather

than establish the truth.

Even the very idea of Arthur the heroic

Britain battling invading

Anglo-Saxons was misconceived. They

said since the

1970s the relationship between the

Anglosaxons and the Britons has been

increasingly reassessed and we would now

tend to think of that relationship as

much more complicated and nuanced if you

like.

Instead of continuous warfare and

hostility, some Britain and some

Anglo-Saxons lived peacefully side by

side. By the end of the 1990s, no

serious historian dared associate the

dark ages with a real King Arthur

again, including Orcock

himself. He had the great sense, rare

among myth hunters, to accept that he

was probably

wrong. I'm not aware of my dad taking

criticisms hard. He always saw there was

another argument. He always had some

doubts as to whether Arthur existed.

He he always was prepared to accept

there were other sides to the argument.

Despite his mistakes at Cadbury in

1973, Orco became the first professor of

archaeology at Glasgow University and

excavated dark age hill forts in

Scotland with huge success.

[Music]

Orcock's legacy was not only furthering

our understanding of dark age Britain,

but also the lasting impact he had on

the archaeologists he

taught. Without a doubt, Orcock's work

encouraged an interest in dark age

archaeology among a succeeding

generation of

archaeologists, most of whom are active

today.

Leslie was a great

teacher, a great academic and I think he

deserves more recognition than probably

he gets and I think in due course his

his contributions will be fully

recognized not least amongst the sort of

the hundreds of um students that he

trained and sent out into the

archeological world.

You can't underestimate Leslie Orcott's

contribution to the world of

archaeology. This was a remarkable step

change in the way the archaeology and

the public interacted and it's a legacy

that we're still living under.

As for South Cadbury, the hill fort is

now barely even signposted.

home just to cows and walkers. Its

association with King Arthur once again

buried deep beneath the

ground. And although he may not have

found Camelot, Orco had discovered the

fortified remains of a great leader.

You certainly didn't find the Camelot of

Romance as you found it in the Middle

Ages. We did find that the hill had been

a great fortified place at exactly the

right

time. And we now know South Cadbury Hill

Fort was one of Britain's largest and

most significant ancient

settlements occupied for 4,000 years

from Neolithic times until the Middle

Ages.

Leslie Or's excavation at South

Cabarbury was in many ways a great

success. It found an outstandingly

useful sequence of occupation from a

British hill

fort. And where does that leave the

legend of King Arthur? Was he just a

myth after all?

I personally think that Arthur did exist

that as a Dux Balorum he was a great

military leader where he was when he was

I can't be

[Music]

sure I think we can say that there was a

real person he is called king of the

Britain

every nation needs its foundation myth

And Britain's is the legend of King

Arthur and

Camelot. A legend that lives

on. Heat. Heat.

[Music]

[Music]

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
legend /ˈlɛdʒənd/ B1	noun - a story from the past that is widely believed but may not be true
king /kɪŋ/ A1	noun - a male ruler of a country or territory
resonate /ˈrɛzəˌneɪt/ C1	verb - to evoke a strong emotional response
knight /naɪt/ A2	noun - a man who serves a king or lord as a soldier or fighter
spectacular /spɛkˈtækjələr/ B2	adjective - impressive and striking
myth /mɪθ/ B1	noun - a widely held but false belief or story
archaeologist /ˌɑːrkiˈɒlədʒɪst/ B2	noun - a person who studies human history by digging up and examining old objects
brilliant /ˈbrɪliənt/ B1	adjective - extremely clever or talented
excavate /ɪkˈskæveɪt/ B2	verb - to dig up and remove earth or other material to uncover buried objects
fortification /ˌfɔːrtɪfɪˈkeɪʃən/ C1	noun - a defensive structure built to protect a place from attack
invader /ɪnˈveɪdər/ B1	noun - a person or group that enters a place by force
unified /ˈjuːnɪfaɪd/ B2	adjective - made into a single unit or whole
magnificent /mægˈnɪfɪsənt/ B2	adjective - extremely beautiful or impressive
evidence /ˈɛvɪdəns/ B1	noun - something that proves a fact or claim
tangible /ˈtændʒəbəl/ C1	adjective - able to be touched or felt
charismatic /ˌkærɪzˈmætɪk/ C1	adjective - having a special quality that makes people like and admire them
crucial /ˈkruːʃəl/ B2	adjective - extremely important
fortified /ˈfɔːrtɪfaɪd/ B2	adjective - strengthened and protected against attack
prototype /ˈproʊtətaɪp/ C1	noun - an original model on which something is based
quest /kwɛst/ B2	noun - a long or arduous search for something