It's all about
King Arthur
The real one not a southern made up story
Dog In The Lane is the best Pub Grub outlet in Shropshire, offering excellent food, homemade produce, homemade chips, quality cask ales, in a friendly family run pub, built on the watering hole where King Arthur and his men patrolled his Kingdom
The Choices oposite are factual accounts of King Arthur and the people who became legends along side him, please remove the images of Sean Connery and his fellow actors and the beautiful film sets of Camelot etc. from your mind. The following is the reality that the folk law is built upon.
The King Arthur we have all been brought up with was a romantic figure surrounded by his Knights of the Round Table. Much of this was based onmyth and legend drawn from the Medieval Arthurian Romances. But likemany legends they nearly all have some basis in fact - facts which get lost inthe mists of time.
It is time to dispel these romanticised myths and introduce you to the real King Arthur -‘Owain Ddantgwyn -The Bear’, a great king of the Dark Ages who ruled his kingdom from Wroxeter near Shrewsbury. Manuscripts in the British Library, suggest that King Arthur historically existed. The earliest reference to Arthur, which is still in existence, suggests that Arthur was in fact a king of Powys, a kingdom that once covered what is now Shropshire and Mid Wales.
Excavations at the Dark Age capital of Powys,Wroxeter, four miles to the east of Shrewsbury, have shown that in the fifth century this city may have been the most sophisticated in the country. This is precisely the time that Arthuris said to have been Britain’s most powerful king.
A tenth-century manuscript in the British Library records that Wroxeter was occupied around 493AD by Owain Ddantgwyn, a late fifth-century king of Powys and an important warlord. There is contemporary historical evidencethat he was actually known as Arthur.
The sixth-century monk Gildas refers to Owain by his battle name, The Bear.
In the old British language, and still preserved by modern Welsh, the word for Bear is Arth. ‘Arthur’ therefore seems to have been a title rather than a personal name. Moreover, Owain’s father bore the battle name the ‘Terrible Head Dragon’,which translates into Welsh as Uthr Pen Dragon. In the legends, Arthur’s father is called Uther Pendragon.
When Owain Ddantgwyn died around 520AD civil war appears to have broken out between his rival heirs, his son Cuneglasus based at Wroxeter and his nephew Maglocunus based in Gwynedd, North Wales.
Written three centuries before the Medieval Romances connected Arthur with the South West of England the ninth-century Welsh poem ‘The Song ofLlywarch the Old’ states that the kings of Powys were “heirs of great Arthur”.