Can I suggest that you look even further north to Camelon, near Falkirk in Central Scotland. It sits on the Antonine Wall, with a nearby Roman Fort or camp on the river Carron. At the right time, Stirlingshire was known as Manan, was ruled by Arturius son of Aiden Macgabron who had gone off with the Christian Columba to build his monastery. Arturius made peace deals with with the Picts to the North and united Britons against the invasion of the Saxons.    Merlin.

I think you need to read the Scottish Chronicles, Hector Boethius. In them King Arthur is mentioned by name more than 50 times so of course he was real.

Read 'Searching for Arthur...Finding Arthwys' by Alistair Hall.Cambodunum was a Brittonic fortress between Leeds and York .

The following excerpt was taken from author David Carroll who wrote a book called - Arthur (Arturius) Son Of Aidan - King Of The Scots From 574 AD and reads...
I believe that historical figure to be Artur or Arturius, the son of Aidan, and a real 6th century figure. He may never have been a king, he certainly was a warrior, and could quite easily have been the 'Dux Bellorum' or Battle Leader of the united forces of the Scots and Britons, who were definitely allies at this period, in the wars in the North against the Saxons/Angles of Bernicia and the Picts, by virtue of the fact that his father Aidan was the most powerful King in the North.

Judge for yourself. Artur son of Aidan is identical to the Arthur of Legend in the following respects:

1. He has the correct name, Artur or Arturius, the 6th century version of the name Arthur.
2. He was the son of a most powerful king.
3. He was a christian (a valid point, when half the country was still pagan).
4. He lived at the correct period. (6th century.)
5. He was a contemporary and ally of the Northern King Urien, who was a real historical figure and who is mentioned in the legends as an ally of Arthur.
6. He was an ally of the Kings of the Britons in the wars in the North against the Saxons/Angles and the Picts.
7. He died in battle against the Picts. (Remember in legend Arthur's last battle was against Modred, whose mother was the wife of Lot, king of the Picts.)
8. Artur or Arturius had a sister or half sister called Morgan, as did King Arthur of legend. (Evidence which I was fortunate to find in the 8th cent. 'Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee'.)

Against this Arthur, who is identical in so many respects to the Arthur of the Legends, that I cannot believe it could possibly just be coincidence, is the Arthur of Cornwall, Wales and the West Country of England, where no reliable, historical evidence has ever been found.

Credit to David Carroll for this piece. The book is available in PDF format. https://electricscotland.com/history/arturius.htm

I had a seventh grade grandmother named Janet McAlpin whose family was from Galloway Scotland.

My maiden name however is Edgerton which is the phonetic spelling of Egerton which is a noble family from Cheshire England dating back to Sir William Le Belward ap William, II Lord of Malpas (c. 1060-1111.)

My dad was Scottish Irish and English.

Wasn't Arthur , Son of Arthur, a warlord or chief in ancient Wales, that was what they use to teach in Wales in the textbooks in the 70s/80s. There was various Castles, mounds, churches etc all part of the story, they knew where he was buried etc, the entire story was laid out including Merlin and Guinevere, must be over 40 years since I read all that but that was the gist of it.

Camelot is  Cameluk near Athkar where we get Arthur from near Aaron's chapel and where Saint Patrick was born

Camulodunum abbreviated by everyday use is my favorite theory

I am a published author of science fiction, but I have been fascinated by the Arthurian legends since I was a boy in the 1950s.
I came down this rabbit hole about 20 years ago, when I was corresponding with a certain Aidan Clarke, Professor of Arthurian Studies at the University of Wales. He lived on Anglesy Island, in a real medieval castle himself, and was quite a fashionable character.
Has anyone heard of him? Last I heard from him was in 2007 when he said he was writing a book on the subject with his own notes and field studies and archaeology which led him to believe and identify Camelot with Camlaan or Camlann, not far from where he was located.
He also identified Arthur with a Briton warlord who had served with his father in the Roman Army in ancient Britain from Londinium to York areas near Hadrian's Wall, as Artorius. He also said, as I also agreed, that the most historically accurate of all the movies ever made about the subject, the 2004 movie KING ARTHUR starring Clive Owen, which showed the period accurately. Probably the most far-fetched fanciful fantasy movie of the Arthurian legend is the classic 1953 MGM movie KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE, which of course depicts all things as if it were the 12rh or 13th Century, way too late to be accurate.
And there is the Broadway play, CAMELOT, produced in 1960 to 1962, starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews, a delightful musical play by Lerner & Loewe, with excellent romantic songs, made into a movie in 1967 starring Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave as Arthur and Gweneviere. Her character's name is derived directly from Welsh Gaelic, which is spelled Quinnefaire. Mordred and Morganna are interesting characters from Welsh folklore, and the magician Merlin is seen by a lot of scholars as a Pictish warlord shaman. The Knights names offer clues to their origins, such as Sir Launcelot from Brittany, Sir Gawain as some Identify him with the mythical Green Knight, and Sir Sagramore from central Britain. Certainly some of this legend was born in Wales, as well as Scotland.
You make an interesting case for the locations of the castle-towns of 6th Century Britain, and the concept of a mobile court certainly fits more with the period in factotum than a single monarch in an impressive castle keep.

I'd say author was a old roman soldier that had married and retired in Britain and to save his house and family from the vikings. He gathered up his family and friends and started a  post rome empire.  As it they grew in numbers it grew in size.

Jack Whyte's Camelot chronicles is probably the closest to the real legendary Arthur story.

It would make sense to be using Roman roads for fast deployments, and a ever changing court makes an enemy unpredictable. The proverbial Knights could have convinced locations of different territories in union against incursions.

It’s in Scotland! I know it intuitively

Arthur was also referred to as "Pendragon".  That can mean "Chief of Warriors", "Commander-in-Chief" or "Chief Leader".  It can also mean a title given to an ancient Welsh/British prince holding supreme power.

The legend of King Arthur is (in my opinion) an adaptation of the history of the earlier invasions of Britain by the Romans, as well as being a fictionalisation of war with England and the fear of war with England in Northern Wales and in Northern England.

The battle of the forest is connected with Caedmuir in Peeblesshire

Well you can approach it from different dorections, if Arthur is an amalgation of several characters, including Arthur Mac Aedan, Artorius Castus, welsh Athrwys, the irish Arts, Riothamus and possibly a celtic God Artaius or Arterancus, then his homecastle was either in Scotland, Caerlion or the Otherworld,  or Winchester or near the Humber. In medieval literature Camelot is usually somewhere central, between London, Wales, the Saxon Kingdoms, Cornwall and the Old North, so possibly somewhere in the Midlands. All we know is it had a navigatable river near by, a great forest in the North, a major road and was surrounded by farmlands and other castles or allied or subservant kimgdoms. My fav. take would be midlands, an unnamed hillfort on a main river between eastern Wales, the lands west of Londinium, north of Dummonia and south of the old North. Easy to reach for his allied kings, Urien, Anguisel and Lot from North, Ither and Vodinus in the East, Marc,Cador and Rivelin in the South, Lancelot at Bamburg Northeast, York and Humber east, and Gorre, Carmarthen, Snowdon and Cameliard in the West.

They should look in North Brittany (France), 300 a.d.-400a.d. . And be looking for Sir Lancelot and Queen Marche or his Grandfather Lancelot .

Artemedis and Thor..where the Mediteranian meets the Nordic

Silly discussion. It is fairly clear, from not only archaeological evidence but even from the nature of the sparse written accounts, that "Arthur" could not have been a single individual (or at least, that the things attributed to him were not all done by one man). The Historia Brittonum would have us believe that he fought battles everywhere from central Scotland to the French mainland, over a period of some 50 years. If you have any experience studying the genesis of historical myth, you will find that characters like Arthur emerge at first from a single individual, but soon the stories told about them accumulate like a snowball, pulling in all sorts of actual or imagined events done by other people. For example, the story about a shop clerk boy who walks ten miles to return a customer's change appeared in many gazettes and newsletters in the Midwest, in the 1800s. Nobody is sure who first attributed it to Abe Lincoln, but there is documentary evidence that the story was ubiquitous before anyone ever suggested that Lincoln did such a thing.

In Arthur's case, for example, it is likely that every important battle fought by a Romano-Celtic leader against the Saxons was eventually attributed to "Arthur", as the names of lesser leaders were forgotten in the mists of time. One exceptional individual probably initiated the "snowball" but by the time someone got around to writing the story down, his legend had absorbed the story every other notable leader or notable event of the entire century. You could posit that there was a particularly large and ornate town or defensive position, during that period, which served the same function as "Arthur" did for the generic Romano-Celtic military leader. However, the archaeology suggests that no such place existed, at least not in the way described by later authors. The forts and defended towns of early post-Roman Britain were nothing like a "castle". The conflation of "Camelot" with a castle or fortress was an invention of 11th and 12th century poets. Historia Brittonum never mentions such a place

While it is possible that Caerleon or some Welsh location like it may have been the source of the NAME "Camelot", to my ear the name sounds an awful lot like "Cambulac" -- the almost mythical capital city of the Great Khan. Everyone in 12th century Europe had heard of Cambulac, and probably in a poetically exaggerated way. So it would be perfectly typical of the minnesingers of that era to have chosen a name that sounds similar, as the home of their great hero Arthur. Keep in mind that the central purpose of the Arthurian Cycle is to discuss spirituality, morality and human nature - not to tell history.

TL/DR - Even if Camelot did exist, as a location in the real world, it wasnt one single place. Camelot is based on a conglomeration of memories and stories about numerous "kings" and numerous "castles" (some real, some imaginary) that served as centres of cultural and political stability in a collapsing society. So trying to determine which one was "the real Camelot" is rationally absurd. They were all "the real Camelot."

If you read the books I of Wilson and bracket they dedicated their life research on ancient Wales .  And it's about time  this was shown.  And the Angles and Anglo-Saxons invaded ancient Britain .