British archaeologists have reported the discovery of massive walls that appear to be part of a Dark Ages palace complex that existed around the same time and place as King Arthur’s birthplace in the famous legend of Camelot.
The walls, located in the English village of Tintagel in southwest Cornwall, enclose a number of buildings that would have formed the royal centre of the Kingdom of Dumnonia in the 5th and 6th centuries AD, experts suggest.
The dozen or so buried buildings discovered inside the 1-metre-thick (3-foot) masonry walls contained hundreds of fine glass fragments from medieval France and pottery shards from Late-Roman amphorae and Phocaean red-slip ware, thought to have carried wine from modern-day Turkey and olive oil from northern Africa.
The exotic origins of these artefacts suggest that whoever was living inside this building complex would have likely been very wealthy, and probably royalty.
