IXSo at last they walked into Uther’s dun. The place they had come so far to find lay sprawled in confusion beneath the lowering grey stone crags of a high hill. Wooden and wattle huts were strewn, haphazard, on all sides of a large, roughly square area of earth, beaten hard and flat by many feet for many generations. Beyond that square lay the ruins of what had once been a Roman villa, four-square and red-tiled, its courtyard containing fruit trees and a stone fountain. Yet the building which overtopped all, although it was set away from the others, almost at the foot of the steep rocky slopes of the hill, was a temple, domed and columned in a barbaric imitation of the classical style, but made of wood, an immense parody of a civilisation which had now passed into man’s most distant dream
