THE WELSH CAMLAN AND AVALON AT A CHURCH OF ST. ILLTUD

Llanelltyd Near the Afon Gamlan

Llanelltyd Next to Osfran's Grave

The Welsh Avalon at Dyffryn Ardudwy

Since confirming my identification of Uther Pendragon with the Welsh St. Illtud (see, for example, https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2023/01/you-cant-keep-good-saint-down-why.html), and having by necessity moved Arthur from the North to the South, I've been scrambling to pin down both Camlan and the great hero's burial place.  I've not been successful at doing either.  There is no Camlan in the South.  Sure, there are plenty of Cam- place-names, but none have glan or lann as their second element.  This is fatal to any identification attempt.  Various localizations in the physical landscape of a mythical Avalon are possible, but none of them truly bear fruit (pun fullyintended).  The only real Avalon in Britain, and the only one we know of from the ancient period, is the Aballava/Avalana Roman fort at Burgh-By-Sands on Hadrian's Wall.

Because of this, I decided to take another look at the Welsh Camlan, which I had found many years ago.  And the second I pulled that up on a map, I was astonished.  Why?  Because the site lay very near a church of St. Illtud in NW Wales!  Furthermore, the grave of Osfran, which is a primary marker for Camlan, is on a hill (Foel Ispri) that literally overlooks this Llanelltyd.  

What to make of this connection?  Well, I'm not sure.  There is also a tradition for a Welsh Avalon which puts this sacred Otherworld just to the west of Llanelltyd and the Afon Gamlan at some Neolithic tombs in Dyffryn Ardudwy.  I long ago dispensed with this tradition - but, then again, I had long since discounted the Afon Gamlan as the place where Arthur died.  When I was pushing the theory of a Northern Arthur, I readily accepted the later Welsh identification of Badon with Buxton (something found in "The Dream of Rhonabwy"; see https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2020/05/osla-or-ossa-big-knife-and-caer-faddon.html) - and this was despite the fact that the much earlier Welsh Annals seem to place the Second Battle of Badon at Liddington Castle/Badbury (see the end note to the previously cited article). Rather hypocritically, I looked askance at the Welsh placement of Camlan.

Incidentally, Illtud going to Dol in Brittany at the end of his life could be a reference to the Dol- names surrounding Llanelltyd, most notably Dolgellau.  If so, there may once have been a tradition of Illtud actually being present a Llanelltyd, perhaps founding the church himself.  

For now, I will content myself with offering below my posts on the Welsh Camlan and the Welsh Avalon.  As with everything else that has followed upon the heels of the revelation that Uther = Illtud, I am unsure what to make of it all.  In other words, I need time to process it.  There remains what I have come to think of as the 'Sawyl Problem' to contend with (see, most recently,  https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2023/01/and-what-if-uther-pendragon-is-not.html). In brief, if we opt for Sawyl of the North - someone who was confused with Uther-Illtud, metaphorically referred to as a Samuel - then we solve a great many problems, and can even easily retain Camboglanna and Aballava.  But we would have to jettison Uther Pendragon as Arthur's father, and that does not site well with anyone.

All I can say at this point is 'Stay Tuned!'.  

The Welsh Camlan Identified

The three Camlans in Wales are all in Merionethshire, once a kingdom called Meirionnydd that bordered on Ceredig’s kingdom of Ceredigion.  As Welsh tradition insisted that Camlan was an internecine conflict, it makes sense to find the place on the border between two Welsh kingdoms.  And, indeed, Merionethshire was said to have been founded by another of Cunedda’s sons.

It is fairly well known that the Welsh record seven survivors of Camlan. Yet, to my knowledge, no one has sought to plot these personages out on a map. To do so may help us pinpoint a geographical region in which Camlan was believed to be situated.

One of the seven – Geneid Hir – it a difficult and otherwise unknown name. P.C. Bartram (in “A Welsh Classical Dictionary: People in History and Legend up to about A.D. 1000) suggests the name may be corrupt and offers an unlikely identification with a personage named Eueyd or Euehyd Hir (often rendered Hefeydd). However, I would see in Geneid ‘Cannaid’, “white, bright, shining, pure, clean, radiant,” an epithet substituted for the original title Ceimiad, ‘Pilgrim’, of St. Elian. Elian had churches on Mon/Anglesey and in Rhos, Gwynedd.

Sandde Bryd Angel looks to be a pun for the Afon Angell, Aberangell, etc., places immediately to the south of the Camlan on the Afon Dyfi in Merionethshire.

Morfran son of Tegid is from Llyn Tegid, now Bala Lake in Gwynedd.

St. Cynfelyn is of Llancynfelyn in Ceredigion just below the Afon Dyfi.

St. Cedwyn of Llangedwyn in Powys, while somewhat further removed than the rest, is still in NW Wales.

St. Pedrog of Llanbedrog is on the Lleyn Peninsula in Gwynedd, just opposite the three Camlans in Merionethshire.

St. Derfel Gadarn is at Llandderfel near Bala Lake in Gwynedd.

Needless to say, if we “triangulate” with all these names/places, we find at the center the three

Merionethshire Camlans.

So, which one is the right one?

Only one way to know for sure: we must find the Camlann that is claimed as the gravesite of Osfran’s son. This reference comes from the ‘Stanzas of the Graves:’

Bet mab Ossvran yg Camlan,

Gvydi llauer kywlavan…

The grave of Osfran’s son is at Camlan,

After many a slaughter…

[“The Black Books of Carmarthen ‘Stanzas of the

Graves’, Thomas Jones, Sir John Rhys Memorial

Lecture, 1967, Critical Text and Translation.]

While –fran of Osfran looks like Bran or ‘Raven’, the Os- does not look at all right for a Welsh name. I suspected Ys- and after a first search failed, I defaulted to bryn or ‘hill’ as the original of –bran. Thus I was looking for an Ysbryn.

And I actually found him – or, rather, it - in “An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments in Wales and Monmouthshire: VI – County of Merioneth”, p. 98, RCAHMW, 1921.

On the Mawddach River in Merionethshire there is a Foel Ispri. It used to be Moel Ysbryn and was the legendary residence of Ysbryn Gawr or Ysbryn the Giant. If we go north on the Mawddach we run into its tributary the Afon Gamlan, i.e. the Water of the Crooked Bank.

According to David Hopewell, Senior Archaeologist with the Gwynedd Archaeological Trust, 

"As far as we know the Roman road runs to the east of the Mawddach.  It is well-preserved and easy to trace from Tomen-y-Mur to Penystryd (just E of Bronaber) after that it presumably runs to Brithdir but its line is somewhat debatable.  On current evidence I don’t know of anything crossing the Gamlan."

A Note on Northwestern Wales as the Site of Arthur’s Grave

       Dyffryn Ardudwy chambered tombs

There are a few Camlans/Gamlans in northwestern Wales or Gwynedd. The presence of these sites has prompted various Arthurian scholars to propose that Arthur fought his last and fatal battle in this region. The modern champions of this notion are Steve Blake and Scott Lloyd, whose book PENDRAGON: THE DEFINITIVE ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGINS OF KING ARTHUR, was released in 2003 by Lyons press.

We cannot ignore these Camlans or Gamlans (the most noteworthy being the Afon Gamlan, a river) when searching for a historical Arthur. Unlike the placement of Camlan (or Camlann) in Cornwall, something done by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF BRITAIN, Gwynedd can claim to possess real candidates for Arthur’s final battle site. The only other known site that qualifies linguistically is much further north – Camboglanna on Hadrian’s Wall.

Blake and Lloyd place their trust in a very late medieval source, the VERA HISTORIA MORTE DE ARTHURI, a work dated in extant MSS. to c. 1300, although perhaps to originals dating between 1199 and 1203. According to Blake and Lloyd, the VERA HISTORIA probably was written in Gwynedd. I will not contest this point, as it may well be correct.

The importance of the VERA HISTORIA lies in its placement of Arthur’s internment – and thus of Avalon – in Gwynedd. Although Blake and Lloyd are familiar with the Gwynedd tradition which places Arthur’s grave at Carnedd Arthur near Cwm-y-llan or Cym Llan (an error for Cwm Llem, the Valley of the river Llem), they choose to ignore this bit of folklore and instead settle on Tre Beddau near Llanfair, well to the east on the Conwy River, as the actual burial place of the king. They deduce this from the fact that the VERA HISTORIA states that the grave is near a church of St. Mary (in Welsh, Llan-fair), and that archaeologists have recently uncovered a Dark Age or 6th century cemetery at Tre Beddau.

[Note: Cwm Llan is a very clumsy attempt at rendering Camlan, and is obviously spurious tradition.  There is no linguistic relationship between the two names.]

Unfortunately, the authors of PENDRAGON also choose to ignore the description of the burial place of Arthur as preserved in the VERA HISTORIA. In their own words, the burial of Arthur after Camlan is told as follows:

“… the VERA HISTORIA describes the funeral of Arthur as taking place at a chapel dedicated to the Virgin, the entrance to which was so narrow that the mourners had to enter by first forcing their shoulder into the gap and then dragging the rest of their body through the opening. While the funeral took place inside the chapel, a large storm blew up and a mist descended, so thick that is was impossible to see the body of Arthur – which had been left outside, as it would not fit into the chapel. Following the storm the mourners came out to find that the body had gone and the tomb prepared for Arthur was sealed shut, ‘such that it rather seemed to be one single stone’.”

Now, this passage quite obviously DOES NOT portray a 6th century Christian cemetery. Rather, it is a fitting description of a ‘chapel’ comparable to the “Green Chapel’ of SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT. In other words, the said ‘chapel’ is a Neolithic chambered tomb, whose passage is so tight as to barely allow the entrance of the mourners.

Furthermore, we are talking about TWO conjoined passage tombs – one that is the chapel of the Virgin, and the other which mysteriously receives the body of King Arthur. In all of Gwynedd, there is only one such ancient monument: that of the double chamber tomb of Dyffryn Ardudwy not far west of the Afon Gamlan.

One of the two chambers of Dyffryn Ardudwy is actually known as Coetan Arthur or Arthur’s Quoit. The “Virgin” is here a Christian embellishment on what would have been a pagan goddess associated with the Otherworld site.

The grave of Arthur discussed in the VERA HISTORIA is thus a product of folklore only. It can thus be dismissed as an actual grave of Arthur.

Granted, we cannot so easily dismiss the Camlans/Gamlans in northwestern Wales. Since writing this, Dr. Jessica Hughes of CADW has sent me information via snail-mail that adds important details to the description of the Dyffryn Ardudwy chambered tombs. To quote Dr. Hughes:

“The Chambered tomb at Dyffryn Ardudwy has been known as Coetan Arthur in the past, indeed antiquarian reports of the site refer to Dyffryn as ‘Coetan Arthur’. However, the name appears to refer to the whole of the monument as opposed to a particular chamber. Interestingly (and maybe somewhat confusingly), one mile to the east of Dyffryn lies another chambered tomb known as ‘Cors-y-Gedal’. This was also known in the past as ‘Coetan Arthur’… Regarding whether there is a church of St. Mary in proximity to Dyffryn Ardudwy, I have found a church 4 miles north of Dyffryn in the village of Llanfair. “

The enclosed Detail Report on this Church of St. Mary states that Llanfair was dedicated to Mary “by at least the 12c when Gerald of Wales and Archbishop Bladwin stayed there in 1188…”

Here is the COFLEIN listing for the second chambered cairn:

http://www.coflein.gov.uk/en/site/93724/detai

ls/CORS-Y-GEDOL%2C+BURIAL+CHAMBER/

“A rather tapering rectilinear cairn, c.31m NESW by 14.5m, showing at its eastern end a number of orthostats, partly supporting a tipped capstone, c.3.6m by 3.0m & 0.45m thick: a spindlewhorl, thought to be IA, is said to have come from under the capstone.”

Both of these chambered tombs are directly west of the Afon Gamlan.