Bamburgh, less than a day's ride north of Dunstanburgh, is the probable site of Sir Lancelot's famous castle of Joyous Garde, where he once gave refuge to Tristan and Iseult, and where he himself retired to escape the rumours of his liaison with Arthur's Queen Guenevere.

Towering above the tiny village of Bamburgh on the bare, sandy coastline of Northumberland, the massive walls of this medieval fortress are one of two such places believed to be the original site of Lancelot's castle of Joyous Garde. Interestingly, there was a Dark-Age stronghold on the same site, which may account for this tradition.

In 547 it became the capital of the Northumbrian 'Kingdom' of the Angles who had settled there in the early part of the sixth century; as such, it would have been a stronghold of the Saxon alliance, who were Arthur's prime enemies in his fight to maintain British rule. At the time, the site was not called Bamburgh, but seems to have been named 'Din Guayrdi', which may have suggested Joyous Garde to Sir Thomas Malory, who first described it as Lancelot's holding in his fifteenth-century Arthurian 'novel', Le Morte d'Arthur.