LONDON -- King Arthur's legendary Round Table has been found in Scotland, and it is not a table at all but a rotunda that the monarch may have built from the stones of an ancient Roman temple, Britain's authority on aristocracy said Monday.
Arthur, who according to legend was a fourth-century Celtic king who fought Saxons invading Britain, organized 1,600 feuding barons around what was thought to be a table at his fort, Camelot, in Cornwall of southwestern England or Wales.
Burke's Peerage, which researches aristocratic lineages, determined in October while tracing the ancestry of a Scottish barony that Camelot was located at Greenan castle, in the Scottish village of Ayrshire, which was owned by the Kennedy clan, from whom President John F. Kennedy descended.
'The scholastic breakthrough in proving that Scotland was the headquarters of King Arthur ... needs only the uncovering of the Round Table to convince the world that other Arthurian myths connecting the monarch with England and Wales are fallacious,' said Burke's publishing director Harold Brooks-Baker.
Historians have not determined whether the Arthurian legend is based on a real person, much less whether the exploits of Arthur, Sir Lancelot and the other knights of the Round Table took place in Scotland or Wales.
But they have found stones apparently from a large round building, or rotunda, in Stenhouse, 415 miles north of London and 65 miles northeast of Ayrshire, which some believe is Arthur's Round Table.
The word 'roonde' was incorrectly assumed, they said, to be an old Scottish adjective for 'round,' instead of the noun that means 'rotunda.'
Known locally as 'Arthur's O'on' or oven, the rotunda was dismantled in 1743 when the stones were used to repair a dam at a local mill.
Robert Mitchell, a personnel administrator from Miami and an Arthurian enthusiast, said six years of research showed the exact site where the stones were buried when the river Carron changed its course.
He estimated it would cost $320,000 to excavate the rotunda.
'Originally it may have been a Roman temple or shrine to the goddess of victory, and it would have been the oldest building in Scotland, perhaps the whole of Britain, excluding Ireland,' Mitchell said. 'Certainly, it's of tremendous antiquity.'
Mitchell, who worked on the project with Norma Goodrich, of Claremont, Calif., an authority on Arthur, estimated the stones are 4 feet long and 4 feet in diameter, and would reach a height of 22 feet when reassembled.
'I believe that if it was originally a shrine to the goddess of victory, you can see how the aspect of valor and heroism would have been merged, and appealed to the Arthur legend,' Mitchell said.
'If it were ever excavated, it would be conceivable that it possibly could be rebuilt, as we have a drawing of it from 1720,' he said.
A replica of Arthur's O'on was built at Penicuik, 400 miles north of London, as a protest to the destruction of the original. It is still standing.
