The Annales Cambriae have only this to say of Camlann; ‘the battle of Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut (Mordred) perished’. And so, perhaps, they did, but legend has ever insisted that Arthur survived his wounds and was carried to the magical isle of Avalon where he still sleeps with his warriors. We have clearly moved far beyond the realm where any self-respecting historian would venture, except to suggest that the belief in Arthur’s survival reflects a deep and popular nostalgia for a lost hero, and in all the isle of Britain no legend is more persistent than this notion that Arthur still lives. ‘A grave for Mark,’ the Black Book of Carmarthen records, ‘a grave for Gwythur, a grave for Gwgawn of the red sword, but, perish the thought, a grave for Arthur.’ Arthur was probably no king, he may not have lived at all, but despite all the efforts of historians to deny his very existence, he is still, to millions of folk about the world, what a copyist called him in the fourteenth century, Arturus Rex Quondam, Rexque Futurus: Arthur, our Once and Future King.