Yarrow is King Arthur’s final resting place – archaeologist
THE Yarrow Stone marks the grave of King Arthur, a literary archaeologist claimed this week, writes Sally Gillespie.
Damian Bullen said there was a consensus among academics that the Liberalis Stone (another name for the Yarrow Stone) was the burial ground of two Christian princes who reigned in the fifth and sixth centuries AD – and one of those, he believes, was King Arthur.
Mr Bullen, 35, of Edinburgh, said: “When we strip away the mediaeval romancing of our legendary king, we are left with genuine nuggets of historicity. One of them is the stone at Yarrow which I am convinced is his grave marker.”
The famous monarch is reputed to have died with his nephew, Mordred (Medrawt), in a crooked glen, which Mr Bullen said matches the river bends in the Yarrow Valley near the Liberalis Stone.
Ploughing in the area 300 years ago revealed a large flat stone inscribed in Latin, saying it was a memorial to “the most famous princes Nudus and Dumnogenus. In this tomb lie the two sons of Liberalis”.
Mr Bullen went on: “At first glance it seems that Prince Nudus and Prince Dumnogenus were the sons of King Liberalis, but there is more to these names than meets the eye.
“Calling our two princes ‘sons of Liberalis’ would be a poetic way of saying that they were very noble princes (and) in the context of a burial chamber, the word Nudus (which implies loss of one’s material possessions) is surely used as a deterrent to would-be grave robbers.”
He suggests Dumnogenus, instead of being a prince, means ‘born of the Dumno’, which he takes as referring to the Dumnonii tribe of ancient Britons in Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset.
“This knowledge renders the inscription as, ‘Here lie two famous and very noble princes of Dumnonia, buried without possessions’. Of all the princes of antiquity who have heralded from this region, there is one who stands head and shoulders above all the rest – King Arthur. That he died with a family member – Mordred – fits the inscription on the Yarrow Stone completely.”
He claimed the monks of Glastonbury, where some believe Arthur to be buried, made the story up to raise money.
Mr Bullen notes there are battlefield burials in the area and he suspects Arthur’s corpse was the well-preserved skeleton found on Whitehope Farm in the mid-19th century, but which was gradually lost to curio-seekers.
And from letters dating back to the period, the literary archaeologist also thinks King Arthur’s skull may be in the vaults of a local museum.
Asked to comment on Mr Bullen’s hypothesis, Selkirk historian Walter Elliot said: “Mr Bullen has certainly researched the Yarrow Stone and the various stories about Arthur very well. Whether the two can be joined together is a matter of question.
“Arthur, if he existed, was never a king, but the war leader of the Christian Welsh speakers against the pagan Anglo-Saxons, and the Yarrow Stone is on the linguistic division between the two languages. So far, so good. Arthur is claimed as a local hero from Orkney to the Continent and his graves are many. This is a tricky subject.”
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Wednesday 22 February 2012
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