A map of somewhere
This is not a map of Britain. It is a schematic of relative position, because almost nothing in the legend can actually be located, and the places that can are usually the ones somebody had an interest in locating.
Camelot is unplaceable on purpose. Glastonbury’s monks discovered Arthur’s grave in 1191, shortly after a fire had left them needing to raise money. Malory offers two candidates for Joyous Gard and declines to choose. Each entry below records who claims what.
Tintagel
Where Arthur is begotten, in Geoffrey and in Malory. A real Cornish headland with a real medieval castle — built, awkwardly, about a century after Geoffrey wrote.
Camelot
Chrétien names it once, in passing, and never explains. Caxton's preface asserts it is Winchester; Malory does not. It is the one place in the legend that is deliberately nowhere.
Guinevere, and the Table as a dowry · The Pentecostal Oath · The Grail enters the hall
Carlisle
Malory's northern court, and where the queen is brought back under the Pope's peace.
Salisbury Plain
Malory sets the last battle 'upon a down beside Salisbury'. The Welsh annals name the field Camlann and say only that Arthur and Medraut fell there.
Avalon
The isle Arthur is carried to 'for the healing of his wounds'. Glastonbury's monks announced they had found his grave there in 1191, which was extremely convenient for Glastonbury.
Corbenic
The Grail castle, and unplaceable by design: knights reach it by not looking for it.
Elaine of Corbenic, and the begetting of Galahad · The achieving of the Grail
Joyous Gard
Lancelot's castle, where he takes the queen after the rescue. Malory says some men call it Alnwick and some Bamburgh, and declines to settle it.
Astolat
Where the Fair Maid dies, and from where her barge is steered down the river to Westminster.
Amesbury
The nunnery Guinevere retires to, and where she refuses Lancelot a last kiss.
Mount Badon
The one battle the earliest sources agree happened. Gildas describes the victory and names no commander; Nennius, three centuries later, makes it Arthur's twelfth.
Benwick
Lancelot's kingdom over the sea, where Arthur besieges him while Mordred takes England behind them.
Orkney
Lot's kingdom, and the house whose loyalty to itself finally breaks the fellowship.
Why the map is deliberately vague
Locating Arthur is the oldest and most persistent temptation in this subject, and it has an unhelpful history: Geoffrey’s fiction read as recoverable fact, a grave found exactly when a monastery needed one, a national origin story assembled from a battle list.
The honest position is that these are places in texts. Where a text names somewhere real, that is a fact about the text. It is not evidence about the sixth century.The method, in full →