The young boy couldn’t have been a day older than four. A gentle breeze flicked through his dark brown hair as he ran along the narrow path that followed the stream flowing gently through the narrow ravine. The valley was covered in emerald, green ferns and tall oaks leaning out from the sides probably for hundreds of years. But there was nothing menacing about it. The boy’s father strolled along behind him, smiling at the young chap’s antics. They reached a large fallen oak straddled across the narrow stream and the boy threw his one leg over it, as if to ride it like a horse, and imagined he was galloping away through the undergrowth.
They were happy times. The glen was filled with magic; he didn’t know why, he just felt it. There was just something going on around him that he didn’t understand and too young to even comprehend. So much so, that throughout the many, many years thereafter, he wasn’t even able to know if in truth, he had been imagining a beautiful recurring dream.
It was during the sixth century, it is told, that King Arthur and the knights of the round table gathered in Camelot, a castle in the small town of Camelford in Cornwall, not too far from Tintagel which itself is a small fishing village not a stone’s throw away from St Nectan’s glen.
The legends are boundless and have been retold over the centuries by poets and scribes of the day, but as there is very seldom smoke without fire, and no one has been able to attest differently, the legend of the brave knights has survived close on four thousand years.
It is written that the cup from which Lord Jesus drank from at the last supper became known as the Holy Grail which was then later used by Joseph of Arimathea to collect the Jesus’ blood during the crucifixion.
The Knights of the round table went down in history for their chivalry, spiritual enlightenment, bravery and courage and an inordinate zest for adventure, and it was written that the one empty seat at the round table would be filled by a Knight who sought and found the Holy Grail. Shortly after that, when Arthur accidentally withdrew the famous sword embedded in a large stone, somewhere in Wales, where hundreds before him had failed, the King was crowned in that empty chair. It was around this time that news of the Holy Grail had found its way to Europe, and the Knights of the round table decided to commence their quest to find it.
In September of 2023, some 3, 900 years later, brothers Nick, Michael Kim and Richard, now all in their early to mid-seventy’s, decided to journey back to their roots on a pilgrimage of discovery in the land of their birth in Cornwall on the southern coast of England.
They made our way slowly down through Eastbourne, Portsmouth, Bournemouth, and on to Plymouth, where they invaded a local pub in time to watch the Springbok rugby team take on Scotland in their opening match of the 2023 world cup. As destiny would have it, equally ‘old’ friends, Bryan and Barnie Smith from Cape Town were also in town and joined the brothers to celebrate what they all passionately believed would be another world rugby cup win for the green and gold.
The following morning we wandered the streets of Plymouth and walked up onto the huge expanse of parkland overlooking the Sound. Today Plymouth is a modern city with stunning architecture set in stunning landscaped surrounds. A far cry from our parents’ and grandparents’ days in the second world war when virtually the entire city was destroyed by waves upon waves of German bombers.
The Phillips family were piano merchants, “Suppliers to the Royal House” and our father, Peter Nicholas, was the last son to be sent on a seven-year apprenticeship to the Steinway and Bechstein factories in Germany before Hitler tore the world apart. George street, one of the main throughways in the centre of Plymouth, stands to this day, but we were unable to find number 15 – 16. In its place stood a huge modern glass and stainless-steel building housing one of the popular department stores. Nothing remained of the decades of craftmanship and passion for music that was housed in that store up until 1944.
We made our way to Tavistock, where young Richard had arrived on the earth in the winter of 1950 in the then Tavistock Maternity hospital. We wandered the streets of the village and browsed through the stalls in the town market before moving on to the Cornish coast and Tintagel.
The coastal cliffs, hills and dales of Cornwall have not materially changed over the centuries other than the fact that today they are very popular holiday destinations made famous for their pubs, beauty, quaintness, pasties and of course Rick Stein, the famous bubbly Michelin Star chef from a little fishing village of Padstow, not far from Tintagel.
We walked the village and savoured its treats amongst a busy crowd of visitors. We found our way on foot to St Materiana Church up on the hill overlooking the cliffs to the one side and the village on the other. This was where our Grandfather Nicholas had been buried. We will never know what happened and why. But he had died alone, far from his son, daughter in law and grandsons, all of whom were, at the time, still trying to find their feet on the hot sands of Southern Africa. Gone was his world of industry, disaster, war and peace. May he rest in peace.
And then we discovered Trethevy. It stood, large and proud on the hillside just outside Tintagel. A large, white, double story home standing next to what looked like an ancient stone barn. This was the very house where we had lived before our parents’ upped sticks and left for South Africa for a better life. The decision to leave all that history and deep roots behind and traverse the oceans for 12, 000 miles to a strange, hot and potentially dangerous land but one promising of opportunity, must have taken much discussion, late nights of deliberation.
We walked around the yard and looked out across the heath to the cliffs below. The cliffs stretch all along the coast, covered in grass, softly waving in the summer breeze.
Tintagel provides a classic assemblage of rock-coast features, including cliffs, caves, blow holes, gullies, arches and stacks honed from the rocks over millions of years.
Kim led the way up a short winding path behind the house to a small building that looked more
like a barn. Built of stone, it stood surrounded by untended grass and bush as if neglected. Kim pushed open the large wooden door on the side and we stepped straight back into a 15th century chapel of St Piran’s. I followed in silence at the wonder of the ancient surrounds as my younger brother walked down to the sanctuary. “I was Christened at this very spot,” his said quietly in reflection.
Once we had stepped back outside, we followed a simple sign showing the way to “St Nectan’s Glen”. It was an ordinary path that started off as a two-wheel track that led past a couple of private homes nestled away at the edge of a forest. But soon the dirt track shrunk to a foot path the wound its way down a hill and to a stream running through a comparatively narrow glen or valley.
At first, I thought I was dreaming. But slowly and surely the memory returned as the reality of the Irish green ferns, ancient oaks and sparkling stream running through the glen stopped me frozen in my tracks. It had never been a dream. This was the very place that my dad had taken me to in those very early years. This was the magical place that had stuck firmly in my imagination all these years.
The walk alongside the stream to the waterfall at St Nectan’s glen is quite a long one and in places the path is uneven and requires care to cross small washaways and occasional rocks and fallen trees. But eventually the ravine opened up to a large pool of fresh cold mountain water fed by a spring somewhere beyond and out of sight. Into the pool flowed a waterfall. The water cascaded over the high ground down into a smaller pool before overflowing into the larger lake-like pool below. Tourists had made their way across a few stepping stones and were photographing the waterfall.
On my left I saw hundreds of pieces of string and feathers, and metal trinkets hanging randomly from the branches around the pool. Occasionally one would notice a feather necklace similar to what one associates with the indigenous Indians of America.
That strange sense of magic that I had felt as a young boy and was never able to explain came over me once again and I stood staring into the gushing waterfall pondering on what it was all about.
It was at this point that my brother stepped over to my side and pointing at the intermediate pool in the falling water said, “legend has it that the Knights of the Round table finally found the Holy Grail but they also discovered that the extraordinary relic possessed the power to heal all wounds, deliver eternal youth and grant everlasting happiness. King Arthur, understanding the extraordinary powers and the need to avoid man’s temptation, brought the cup to St Nectan’s glen and dropped into the pool to hide it forever.”
“But surely you could clear the pool to the very bottom and recover whatever lies within?”
“That has been tried many times over,” came the reply, “but they found that it is a bottomless pool and no one knows where it goes nor where it ends.”
