There may not be much to warrant the various traditions of Camelot, and there remains nothing to verify them. South Cadbury, or Cadbury Camp, silent and deserted as it now is, undoubtedly has a curious history. It was anciently known as Camallate and Camellek, and was early associated with King Arthur; it was a hill-fort of that strange, strong race of warriors, the Belgæ, who overran the southern counties and were dislodged from their strongholds with the greatest difficulty by the Romans. This camp was as the rallying-point in the British and Christian dominion of Gladerhaf, or Somerset. Some have supposed it was the Cathbrigion where Arthur routed the Saxons in a great battle, and so linked his name indissolubly with the locality. Leland in his Itinerary described it as “sometime a famous town or castle, upon a very torre or hill, wonderfully enstrengthened of nature”; and John Selden, in his notes to the _Polyolbion_ of Drayton, definitely described it as “a hill of a mile compass at the top, four trenches encircling it, and twixt every one of them an earthen wall; the contents of it, within about twenty acres, full of ruins and relics of old buildings.” It has yielded various ancient weapons, Roman coins, a silver horseshoe, and articles of camp equipage. The four concentric deep ditches and the ramparts, forty-five feet apart, can still be traced, and the camp seems to have been originally connected with an extensive intrenchment on the opposite summit of the hill to the north-west. From its position Cadbury must have been an important station commanding the military road which ran from Bower Walls on the Avon to the neighbouring heights of Clevedon--the little town which gave birth to Arthur Henry Hallam, whose ancestral abode, Clevedon Court, is sheltered by the fir-trees which are seen grouped in gloom from Cadbury’s height. At Clevedon also dwelt Coleridge for a time, as several of his poems, written in celebration of the surrounding scenes, will for ever remind us. From Cadbury can be discerned the pretty village of Wrington, where is cherished the memory of the Rev. W. Leeves, who fashioned for “Auld Robin Gray” a fitting melody. It is easy to perceive that the possessor of a stronghold on Cadbury would be able to hold in subjection the entire district, and the name of the place appears to bear witness that a decisive battle once raged there, for _cad_ is the Cornish and Cymrian word for battle, and _bury_ for hill or brow.