By Crasterfarian
When the Roman Empire withdrew its legions from Britain in the early 5th century, it left behind not just monumental buildings and roads, but many trained soldiers, separated and fractured tribes and a gaping power vacuum.
Amidst the chaos, one place stood as a beacon of stability:
Banna, the Roman fort now known as Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall.
But what if Banna wasn’t just a backwater relic of empire, slowly corroding back into the Northumbrian countryside?
What if it became the cradle of a legend?
The Last Commander
In the wake of Rome’s collapse, imagine a Romano-British Roman cavalry officer, once part of the elite Ala I Tungrorum, staying behind at Banna.
It is the only home he has ever known, being born locally and entering the Roman calvalry as soon as he could ride a horse, his family living with him in the camp commander’s residence.
Trained, disciplined and hardened by years of frontier service, he refuses to fade with the Empire. He is married to a local woman and has his children to care for, along with others in the fort.
Instead of fleeing his home, he gathers others, loyal locals, deserters, remnants of Roman units, and turns Birdoswald into a stronghold.
He builds a timber hall on top of the stone granaries of the fort. He rides a powerful destrier, perhaps once bred in Gaul. He wields a long cavalry spatha, unlike anything seen among the tribes.
This man is no longer a cavalry officer.
He becomes a protector, a king, even if only in deed.
Maybe we can also see this man leading other mounted cavalrymen, training them up himself from the locals or other deserters of the Roman Ala, then commanding them into battle against their foes…
United, together defending their families.
Maybe you can also see these other men being given land and title for their derring-do against the onslaught of the invader. Or perhaps…
Maybe becoming knights at his command…
Maybe that destrier was called Llamrei…
Maybe that sword was called Excalibur…
Maybe that man was known as Arthur…
The Wall and the War
From Banna, he leads his mounted warriors to resist the growing threat from Saxon raiders, Pictish incursions and tribal unrest.
His tactics are swift, mobile and devastating — cavalry charges in terrain where few expect them, with the practiced skill of hardened warriors.
These men are not knights as we would know them now, but early sworn men, oath givers. Knees were taken, united by bloodshed in mortal danger — a band of brothers.
He is whispered of in nearby forts along the old stone Line of Rome:
Camboglanna (Castlesteads)was also known as Avalana, perhaps evolving over time into Avalon.
The populations of Uxelodunum (Stanwix), Aesica (Great Chesters) and Vercovicium (Housesteads) would hear his name and fear his wrath should they step out of line.
All of these places will have become homes to tribal warlords in the late 5th century as the country plasticised, reformed and emerged into the power vacuum left by the legions.
A time for the survival of not just the fittest, but the strongest, smartest and the most well-trained.
It will have been a time of upheaval, a time of fear and jeopardy for travellers and isolated farmers. But he came as a man who led a band of protectors, saving people from robbers and brigands.
The Rise of the Legend
Over generations, his story is told around the hearths and feasting tables of the whole country, warped by time, embellished and embroidered with myth.
He becomes more than man.
He becomes Arthur.
Arthur who led the last charge.
Arthur who defended the Wall.
Arthur, whose kingdom was born of ruins and chaos, but whose memory became a beacon for hope in the darkness.
Why Banna?
- Archaeology confirms a post-Roman timber hall. No other site on the Wall has such sustained occupation.
- Cavalry traditions lingered there longer than almost anywhere else.
- Folklore and place names along the Wall echo Arthurian legend.
- It lies at the frontier of the Old North (Yr Hen Ogledd) — the lands of early Welsh and Brittonic memory.
- There are standing stones and wells all along the Wall front that are named after Arthur.
Yes, this is a fantasy story from an overrly fertile mind, but legends start somewhere so why not here?
Perhaps Arthur was not a king of all Britain but a commander from Banna.
That’s not only plausible, but poetic.
Visit the Wall. Stand at Birdoswald. Look across the Irthing Valley and imagine the thunder of hooves.
The Roman walls may crumble, but legends ride on.
With love from the Crasterfarian xx
Great stuff, as usual, thank you.
I definitely agree on the King Arthur associations at Birdoswald.
However, to see Arthurian origins there IMO is a false lead, as the legend of Arthur – or Ar-Tor goes way back into ancient times with the Sumerian Ishkur – the Lord of the mountain – the Ar of the Tor, also known as Enlil – and was a storm god.
Later it would syncretise into Osiris, and the Egyptian myths were brought to Britain by early Celts and later Romans, whose love of Egyptian polytheism – especially Isis worship and Osiris worship in the form of Serapis – was rife at the time of the building of the Wall.
The North West and Cumbrian region is fife with Arthurian, Sumer0-Babylonian and Celtic names and legends.
Here are some extracts from my book Return of the Storm God:
Dolmens and the Drift West: Iberia, Ireland, and Britain
A wider pattern emerges when we examine dolmens, circular mounds, and tombs across Iberia, Ireland, and Britain. These structures reflect not isolated invention but a shared symbolic and ritual system that migrated with peoples and ideas – especially along Atlantic-facing drift paths that connect the Iberian Peninsula to the British Isles.
Across this arc:
Dolmen de Soto (Huelva, Spain) features a long corridor (~20 m), carved engravings, and a terminal chamber with solar alignment (winter solstice sunrise), dating to c. 3000–2500 BCE – directly comparable to Brú na Bóinne.
The Dolmen of Menga (Antequera, Andalusia), dated c. 3750–3650 BCE, is aligned not to the sky, but to La Peña de los Enamorados – a mountain anthropomorphised as a sleeping goddess. This links the structure to earth-aligned goddess reverence, showing an early focus on sacred landscape.
These Iberian monuments predate and prefigure the passage mounds of Ireland and Britain, including:
Newgrange (c. 3200 BCE), with its precisely aligned solar chamber
Knowth and Dowth, with dual passage orientations and basin stones
Eamont Henge (commonly known as King Arthur’s Round Table), dated to c. 2500 BCE, and Tynemouth’s lost henge, likely from the same late Neolithic period, each roughly 50 m in diameter – placing them within the same dimensional and chronological tradition as Dolmen de Soto (c. 3000–2500 BCE).
Castlerigg (Cumbria), although a stone circle, shows internal structures that suggest a possible covering or enclosed mound origin – a tor-like or artificial hill logic echoed at Freebrough Hill near Whitby.
These sites are almost universally:
Situated near water: rivers, springs, or coastal liminality
Symbolically female in name or local myth (e.g. Brigid, Danu, Enamorada)
Aligned to solar or lunar thresholds, confirming a cosmological-religious code based on rebirth, water, and sky
This makes clear:
The tradition that produced the Irish brugh, British barrow, and Iberian dolmen was one ritual language, adapted regionally but retaining core motifs.
That goddess reverence, sacred water, and astral timing were foundational to burial and initiation sites long before Rome or scripture.
Very often they have associations with Storm God type myths, such as burials (reflecting Orion as boat of souls archetype), Arthurian legend (Ar-Tor mythos).
Some even show loosely Orion’s Belt alignments – such as the South Downs trinity of Beacon Hill, Firle Beacon, and Mount Caburn. These three hills form a distinctive diagonal arc, with the central hill (Beacon) flanked by two offset peaks – mirroring the Mintaka–Alnilam–Alnitak configuration of Orion’s Belt. The alignment points southeast toward the Seven Sisters cliffs – a white, sea-facing veil symbolic of the Pleiades and the feminine field, completing the full Orion-to-Pleiades cosmogram. These hill formations, like dolmens and circular henges, are often positioned near springs, dewponds, or hydrological breaks – reinforcing the link between sacred elevation, water, and star-path. The repeated triadic form and axial geometry suggest that many of these sites were not just burial or defensive, but cosmological – embedded into land as part of a sky-mirroring ritual landscape tradition.
This shared system may have originated in the Danube–Anatolia corridor but took form in western Europe through a maritime Celtic-Atlantean drift, embedding itself in both the language (hydronyms, phonemes) and landforms that still carry its
3. Sacred Objects and Mythic Parallels
The four treasures of the Tuatha (spear, sword, stone, cauldron) directly echo the sacred items of Egyptian and Mesopotamian temple rites:
Stone (Lia Fáil) = Tablet of Destiny
Spear/Sword = lightning weapons of Marduk and Baal
Cauldron = womb of rebirth, echoing Isis’s regenerative function
These were not symbolic props, but ritual technologies-preserved tools of initiation from the Inanna-Ishtar lineage.
These four treasures align with a widespread Indo-European pattern of sacred objects representing elemental or cosmological principles. In the Vedic tradition, the treasures appear as Indra’s vajra (lightning bolt), the soma vessel, the sacred fire, and the staff of authority. In Norse mythology, they survive as Gungnir (spear), Draupnir (ring of continuity), Mjölnir (hammer), and the cauldron of wisdom. These archetypes reflect a shared priest-king ritual inheritance across Eurasia.
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King Arthur’s Round Table henge – at Eamont Bridge* – also shows a diameter close to 50 metres. Its interior ring and bank structures follow the same radial logic as henges further south – including Stonehenge and Stanton Drew – but its placement on the Northwestern fringe of Britain confirms the reach of the same architectural standard.
These sites are not aligned merely mythically – they are aligned metrically. Their geometry and measure confirm the operation of a single scalar system. The use of 60 units within sacred architecture demonstrates that sexagesimal thought was not limited to scribes of Larsa, but lived on in builders of the outer isles.
Moreover, this use of the 50 metre/60 megalithic yard ratio shows intentionality. The monuments were not only placed according to astronomical events – they were dimensioned in accordance with harmonic number, suggesting that these builders encoded the breath logic of 1-2-3-4 even into the diameters of the sacred circles.
From Cumbria to the Hebrides, the 50 metre code affirms the survival of a cultural memory – geometry, ratio, natural alignments and structures that reflected natural observations, encoded as myth and legend. It is not the scale of a local tribe. It is the harmonic fingerprint of a shared ancient civilisation.
* Eamont Bridge is in an area replete with ancient henges and monoliths, springs and rivers. Eamont Bridge resonates with the idea of Ea’s Mound – Ar’s Tor – again! And Tor’s Bridge in the Norse was the Bifrost – from bifa and rost – the ‘shimmering road’. Again, this is the axis of Earth to Sky. Ea/Enki was strongly associated with the Storm God archetype (especially with Ishkur and with the ziggurats of Sumer – again, the axis between earth and sky).
This area of the North West is steeped in ancient Arthurian legends, Sumero-Babylonian and Egyptian and Gothic Script etymologies, encoded in legends and place names.
Birdoswald was a Roman fort and milecastle on the Hadrian Wall. Once a marshy bog (therefore sacred to pagans as a goddess – where likely bog iron was originally sourced), and once named Banna – which appears to have Egyptian origins as Ba-nna, the Ba was the Egyptian form of the soul and represented by a Bird called the benu (ba-nu/bana), which arose from the peak of the benben (banna is said to be Celtic for a peak or horn – and here is revealed why): the benben was the primal mound that rose from the primordial waters – Nu – at the Beginning Time, known as Zep Tepi. The benben was also seen as the pyramid, which was a man-made Tor originally.
To build the fort, it is said, the Romans first cleared a woodland created a turf mound. The ba bird was associated with the resurrected god Osiris; Oswald is an Os king (with an Osiris-related name) and a wald is a forest or upland forest. (A cohort of Dacians were stationed there – men from Roman Romania – Transylvania). Collectively, in the names, old and new, and in the land, we have the archetypes and typology inherent in the Ar-Tor myth.
River Irthing is a tributary of the River Eden, which flows past Birdoswald, and was formerly known as Ard and Arden – Ar-den – the place of Ar. The modern name Irthing faintly echoes the ancient name of the Nile, as Iteru.
– From Chapter 6 of Return of the Storm God: see – https://ivanfraser.substack.com/p/return-of-the-storm-god
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I have traced a long lineage of the Arthurian myth from ancient Armenia through to Sumer and Egypt into the Celtic territories. It isn’t a local myth, but a common one that was embraced by the Britons as Celts and Anglo-Saxons.
Unfortunately, the Romans colonised Britain and erased most of the history, leaving their imposed Universal religion of Christianity as the inspired recorded history. But archaeology, linguistics, genetics, and mythology supports the version that I am uncovering in the book.
A book, I might add which I was largely inspired to write by things that I read on this website a while ago. For which I am most grateful.
All the best
Ivan