A new suggestion for Arthur's second most famous battle has been proposed - Braydon Forest - it should be, says Andrew Breeze. the Battle of Mons Bradonicus.
The context for the battle is the battle for Cirenceaster between the Saxons and the Britains. - which Breeze calls the capital of Celtic Britain.
The full text is :
Salon: Issue 325
1 September 2014
'Another major hillfort, this time Ringsbury Camp, in the parish of Purton, some 5 miles east of Swindon, is being proposed as a possible site for the Battle of Badon, or Mons Badonicus, which Gildas says was decisive in halting the westward march of hostile Saxon migrants around AD 490 (though an alternative reading of the crucial passage in Gildas suggests that the battle that took place there was part of a civil war for supremacy in southern England, rather than a conflict between British and Saxon combatants). Various suggestions have been made over the centuries for the location of the battle, including Liddington Castle (aka Badbury Castle, near Badbury, 7 miles north of Marlborough, Wilts), Badbury Rings, in Dorset and Little Solsbury Hill, near Bath.
Fellow Andrew Breeze, in a forthcoming paper called ‘Arthur’s Battle of Badon and Braydon Forest, Wiltshire’, to be published in the Journal of Literary Onomastics, says that all of these suggestions are wrong, because the form ‘Badon’ is corrupt: ‘nobody has ever been able to explain it’, he writes, ‘even though it must be a British Celtic name’. He argues that ‘Mons Badonicus’ is an early error for Mons Bradonicus or Mount Braydon, a reference to Braydon Forest. If so, the best candidate for the battle site is Ringsbury Camp: ‘it is situated not far from the Roman road from Winchester to Cirencester, and is the natural place where an attack of West Saxons on the Britons of Cirencester (long the capital of Celtic Britain) might be defeated’, Andrew concludes.'
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