Map coordinates: Ordnance Survey Explorer Map OL24 (The Peak District: White Peak Area), locator horizontal 65, vertical 97; Google world map home page (with satellite option): enter search terms "swythamley hall + staffordshire".

Route: Although Sir Gawain could have forded the River Dee at Poulton Abbey, we had to drive south a few miles to a bridge, and then north along the Dee to the A55, then to the A51 and the A54 into the Peak District via Wincle and Danebridge on the River Dane. Here in the Peak District is the best candidate for the location of Bertilak’s castle, Hautdesert.

Log: The locations of Bertilak’s castle Hautdesert and of the Green Chapel are suggested in SGGK by landscape features that are found in the same area as the language of the manuscript--that is, the Peak District of the NW Midlands, at the juncture of Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Cheshire, near the River Dane, in and around Swythamley Park (Edwards 1997 and Duggan 1997, citing MacIntosh, Samuels and Benskin 1986; Elliott 1997, 1984).

The land here is hilly, high, and almost devoid of trees. It is sheep country until you come down into the Dane Valley, at which point it becomes possible to imagine Sir Gawain on Christmas Eve, lost in a tangled forest and then coming across a “high wilderness,” which is what the name Hautdesert would suggest. Today the area is called the High Forest. Landscape features in the area that are mentioned in SGGK occur near Swythamley. The words for them used by the poet are distinctive to the language of the region, and some are still in use today. For example, in Bertilak's hunt for the boar (lines 1421 ff.), the poet has the hunters assemble at a place that features rocherez ('rocky hillsides', 1427, 1432), a flosche ('swamp', 'marsh', or 'pool', 1430), and a knot ('rocky knoll', 1431, 1434). Words for these features survive as the names of the modern Roaches (below), an outcropping of rock visible from Swythamley; Flash, a location two miles northeast of the Roaches, and Knotbury, which is a half-mile northwest of Flash.

Swythamley today (below) is 16 acres surrounded by a stone wall that keeps visitors from straying off the public footpath going around it. However, at Park House, along the northern boundary, we found someone willing to let us onto the property for a few minutes. She told us that the present manor house was built in the 19th century on the site of the medieval castle, and that the Beatles had once owned it. It was from her we learned also that until recently red deer (hunted by Bertilak in Fitt III; see Twomey 2013) had lived at Swythamley, and that the property was for sale. And so it was again--or still--when Michael Twomey returned in 2011 (below).