A team of researchers from St Andrew’s University in Scotland have made an astonishing discovery regarding an ancient ruin at the other end of the country. The rectangular earthworks known locally as “King Arthur’s Hall” on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor have been found to be much older than had been thought.
The name itself was always considered a fantasy, with the remains of the structure confidently dated to the Middle Ages and thought to be at most a thousand years old. But the new research has now revealed that the site is more than five times older, and dates from the Neolithic.
This would make the site a contemporary of Stonehenge, and predates any written history of the British Isles. It had been previously listed as some kind of animal pen, but as it turns out the clues were there for all to see.
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The site includes 56 standing stones, some integral to the existing structure and some which have apparently been moved from their original position. Such features would be decidedly rare inclusions in a medieval livestock enclosure, and had always seemed out of place.
The St Andrews team, headed by Dr Tim Kinniard from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, used a technique called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) to date the site, a reported by St Andrews University. The technique involves analyzing materials found at the site to assess the rate at which electrons have become trapped over time, a technique similar to radiocarbon dating but for non-organic materials.
The soil buried beneath the 1.8m high bank which surrounds the site would have been disturbed at the time of the original construction, allowing the researchers to date the site by measuring the luminescence signals from this material. Far from being a (relatively) recent construction the earthworks were found to be yet another part of the rich Neolithic landscape covering this part of England.
The link to King Arthur is, of course, squarely in the realm of fantasy, a nickname given to the site as it resembles the remains of a defensive fort. King Arthur has many such spurious associations with the region, including Tintagel Castle on the Cornish coast where he was supposedly born, and Glastonbury Tor in nearby Somerset which medieval monks claimed was the Avalon of Arthurian legend.
The jury is still out on whether King Arthur was a real person at all. But now at least, if he did exist, he would have been able to make use of the ancient and windswept King Arthur’s Hall.
Header Image: The standing stones integral to King Arthur’s Hall had always suggested the site was not just an animal enclosure. Source: Theroadislong / Public Domain.
