Therefore, it seemed sensible to suppose that Arthur’s last battle was also fought in Scotland, but where? I started looking for Camlann where everyone starts, with the name. I found that Camlann had been variously translated as ‘crooked glen” and “crooked stream,” but there are innumerable crooked glens and crooked streams all over Britain—indeed they outnumber the straight glens and the straight streams—and so this translation was of little help. It did, however, prompt the question of why, if Camlann means “crooked glen” or “crooked stream,” anyone would give such a nondescript name to such an important battle. It would have been like naming the Battle of El Alamein, the battle of the sandy place, accurate but not informative. I came to suspect that there was more to the name Camlann than crooked glen or stream. Unable to find an answer to this question, I looked at the district of Camelon in the town of Falkirk, where, as long ago as the nineteenth century, Skene said there was a local tradition that Camelon was Camlann where Arthur died.
