Tale guide

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 leant out from the hill sides for hundreds of years. The shards of sunlight broke through the treetops, falling on brushes of fern and pools of water creating varying degrees of light and shade.

At first glance, one could think that this place was unnerving, but there was nothing menacing about it. It was rather mystical in fact, made more so by the hundreds of coins that people had embedded in the fallen logs or the many small round stones, polished by centuries of running water, that someone had piled on top of each other to create cairns all along the stream.

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 that beautiful recurring dream or that such a place did actually exist.

What the young boy certainly did not know was that during the sixth century, it is told, a certain 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 five hundred years.

It is also written that on the far side of the world, many hundreds of years before, the Lord Jesus had drunk from a cup at the last supper which was then used later by Joseph of Arimathea to collect the Jesus’ blood during the crucifixion; and this cup became known as the Holy Grail.

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 withdrew the famous sword ‘Excalibur’ from its place embedded in a large stone, somewhere in Wales, where hundreds before him had failed, the King was destined to be that man. 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 390 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 their way slowly by car, down from Eastbourne, via Portsmouth, Bournemouth, and on to Plymouth, where they invaded a local pub in time to watch the South African Springbok rugby team take on Scotland in their opening match of the 2023 rugby 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 the brothers 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 splendid landscaped surrounds. A far cry from their parents’ and grandparents’ days in the second world war when virtually the entire city was destroyed by wave upon wave of German bombers.

The Phillips family had been piano merchants, who were appointed the privilege warrant of supply to the Royal family 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 shop number 15 – 16 was long gone. 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. They 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, Cornish pasties and of course Rick Stein, the famous and bubbly Michelin star chef from the 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 and his wife and his three young 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, prosperity, 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 12, 000 miles of ocean to a strange, hot and uncompromising land but one offering opportunity to those who dared, must have taken much discussion and many 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 collection 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 the 15^th century chapel of St Piran’s. Nick and I followed in silence and in wonder of the ancient surrounds as our younger brother walked down to the sanctuary in the front of the immaculately preserved chapel. “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 became confused and momentarily found it difficult to acclimatise to the surroundings. 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 was never a dream! ‘Can you believe it?’ I thought. This was the very place that my dad had taken me to in those far off early years. This was the mystical 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 opens 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.