“Never seek to behold Where the crystal streams ran in the City of Gold.”
Better to people it with the phantoms of Arthur’s Court than to discover that the cavemen of the Mendips made it an abode. “The people can telle nothing ther, but that they have hard say that Arture much resorted to Camalot,” wrote Leland, and that suffices. Camelot is purely ideal, and it is enough to find a real Camelot which faintly recalls the place which Arthur’s eulogists deemed fitting for his Court. Such cities, which had no beginning, have no end, and Camelot will last as long, and prove as indestructible, as Fairyland itself.
“The thrushes sang in the lone garden there-- Clanging of arms about pavilion fair, Mixed with the knights’ laughs; there, as I well know, Rode Lancelot, the king of all the band, And scowling Gawaine, like the night in day, And handsome Gareth, with his great white hand Curl’d round the helm-crest, ere he join’d the fray.”
OF ST. KNIGHTON’S KIEVE AND THE HOLY GRAIL
“The war-worn champion quits the world--to hide His thin autumnal locks where monks abide In cloistered privacy.”--_Wordsworth._
“Hither came Joseph of Arimathy, Who brought with him the Holy Grayle (they say), And preacht the truth: but since it greatly did decay.”
About a mile from Tintagel, along the hilly road leading to Boscastle, and passing the wonderful little Bossiney cove with its elephant-shaped rock, there is a small rapid stream which winds through the Rocky Valley and falls like a torrent at low tide into the sea. The Rocky Valley, with its three huge boulders, its narrow walk now leading to the side of the stream and now mounting far above it, and ending only where the iron cliffs beetle above the roughest of bays, is one of the most sublime spectacles that Nature has to display in that enchanted region. The scenery is a mixture of dark and frowning heights standing out with precipitous sides, and of green and gentle undulations, amidst which sparkles ever and anon the tinkling sinuous brooklet. But it is not so much the valley, despite its manifold charms, as the little stream, which has a special interest for the pilgrim. By devious ways its course may be traced back through a rushy channel which lies deep and almost hidden between two sets of well-wooded hills until suddenly the traveller hears the sound of a sharp splashing from an unseen cataract. The walk now leads upward to a small gate; passing through the opening we descend once more a steep embankment and find ourselves at the water-edge. It is a haunted, sequestered spot, shut in by the hills, overcast by shadows, the one sound the sound of the leaping stream. This is St. Knighton’s Kieve, once regarded with a species of holy awe in Cornwall and believed, like most natural wells or “basins,” to be under the special protection and influence of a saint. The superstition is an old one, and slowly dying out, though the belief in holy wells, fairy wells, and wishing wells is one of the most pleasing and least harmful of all ancient fancies. Every spring was of yore regarded more or less as a miracle; every torrent had its tutelary genius.