The county historian Lipscombe wrote in 1847:
On the brow of the high hill…at the north-west corner of a wood called Pulpit Wood, commanding the track of the Icknild Way, is a square camp, with deep ditches on the east and south… The formation of this military work is popularly ascribed to Cunobeline…
He is describing Cymbeline’s Castle, to the right of the public footpath through Chequers Park beginning near Ellesborough church, formerly also called Kimble Castle, Belnius’s Castle, or Cymbeline’s Mount. It is a small contur fort on Pulpit Hill – not impressive enough, perhaps for the real Cymbeline, Cunobelin.
He was a leader of the powerful Catuvellauni of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and it was for fear of Catuvellauni expansionism that the Iceni and other peoples who shared borders with them betrayed the whereabouts of his headquarters to Julius Caesar, when he arrived in 54bce. The Romans in fact headed straight for Colchester, Essex, where Cunobelin had built himself a new headquarters.
Although Lipscomb says that the earthwork was ‘popularly ascribed’ to Cunobelin, this tradition probably began in antiquarian speculation on the place-name Great Kimble, earlier forms of which were in the 19th century still accepted as containing his name. In fact, the earliest recorded form, Cynebellinga gamære, from 903, is thought to be Old English cyne, ‘royal’, and possibly bell, ‘hill’. What helped the antiquaries’ fairly wild guess pass into popular tradition was undoubtedly Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (written between 1606 and 1611).
‘“That’s where King Cymbeline lived”, say the country people, as if Cymbeline had had a castle there recently,’ wrote Alison Uttley in 1950. One countrywoman who lived near told her, ‘It’s got a queer unearthly feeling.’ Alison Uttley had heard another tradition connected with it:
An Ellesborough man said that when he was a boy, about fifty years ago, the children used to run around Cymbeline’s Mount seven times, because there was a tradition that the Devil would appear. An older man, also born in the district, used to run seven times around the smaller of the two tree circles on the top of Beacon Hill to summon up the Devil. Both men remembered that the old people spoke of these legends in their own childhood…It must have taken courage in the lonely haunted places…and I remember hearing of a little boy who never managed the seventh round but scampered off home as fast as he could, thinking the Devil was behind him.