King Arthur's Cave

King Arthur's Cave is a limestone cave at the foot of a low cliff at the north-western end of Lord's Wood in The Doward, near Symonds Yat, Herefordshire, about four miles northeast of Monmouth, in the Wye Valley. The cave entrance lies about 285 feet above the River Wye on a hill, with a double interconnected entrance and two main chambers. It is protected as a nature reserve under the Herefordshire Nature Trust. There is evidence that the cave was occupied by man during the Upper Palaeolithic era, and flint tools and woolly mammoth bones have been unearthed within and around the caves.BackgroundIt is uncertain exactly how the cave got its name. A skeleton of a "giant human" was supposedly discovered in the cave around 1700, but was lost when a local surgeon named Mr. Pye took the skeleton to sea on a voyage to Jamaica and his ship sank. The cave is shrouded in local superstition and is believed to have had a part in the early legend of King Vortigern, a native British king who fought against the invading Anglo Saxons. Vortigern is said to have made his last stand against Aurelius at nearby Ganarew. Lawman mentions a castle on Cloard Hill in the district of Hergin, and has Vortigern dying after the castle was besieged and fired by Aurelius and Uther. Helen Hill Miller, in her 1969 book The Realms of Arthur, suggests a military use for the cave, arguing that the cave's "recesses penetrate very far into the hill, and could hide a substantial force". The cave has a parallel with Cadbury Castle in that it is a cave within a hillfort.