by an educated class throughout the country, who were actuated by the same motives, and did exactly what Stukeley and his followers did with English monuments. They found Druids who had no temples, and remains which they supposed to be temples with no priests; so, putting the two together, they made what they fancied was a perfect whole out of two incongruous halves. So the Scotch, having a rich repertory of fables on the one hand, and on the other having hills without names and sculptured stones without owners, joined the two together, and went on repeating in the same manner their inventions till, from dire reiteration, they took the likeness of fact.
The case was, if I mistake not, very different in Cumberland. The boors of that land had no literature—no learning, and none of that ardent patriotism which enabled the Scotch poets and pedants to manufacture a quasi history for themselves out of other people's doings. It is difficult to fancy the inhabitants of Cumberland troubling themselves with Arthur and his affairs, and wishing to apply his name to their hills or antiquities, unless some ancient tradition had made it probable, and, "valeat quantum," these names may therefore be considered as suggesting a real connexion between the place and the man.
Owing to the extreme brevity of the record in Nennius,[1] there are few things about which greater discrepancy of opinion exists even among the believers in Arthur than the localities of his battles. Taking them in the order in which they are mentioned, the first is said to have been fought on the river Glem of Glein, which the editors of the 'Monumenta Historica Britannica' suggest may be a river of that name in Northumberland. The river indicated is so small a brook that it is difficult to fancy its name should be attached to so important an event.
If we must go so far north, I would rather feel inclined to place it at Wood Castle, near Lochmaben, in Dumfriesshire, where there is a circular enclosure identical in plan and dimensions with King Arthur's Round Table at Penrith.[2] Strategically, it is a much more likely spot than the exposed east coast of Northumberland;
