St Nectan's Kieve

One of our earlier stops on the Cornwall trip was St Nectan's Kieve. It was 1986, I think, that I first made a visit to St Piran's Well at the entrance to the Kieve but have never walked up the valley itself. I knew about the waterfall, but wasn't completely prepared for what we found there. St Piran's Well has recently been tidied up and isn't the ivy-choked ruin that relatively recent writers have described, which is good.

As for the Kieve, you must be able to drive to the tea room and complex at the top, but we picked our way up the gorge through the woods, crossing wooden bridges and clambering around stones and tree roots. As always with these things you wonder how long it's going to take but the journey does increase the sense of anticipation and separation from the world outside. You arrive at the shop, where, if you're lucky (the staff seem reluctant to linger in one place very long) you will be greeted, given tickets, and offered a pair of wellington boots. You then pass through a gate and down slippery steps to make the descent to the waterfall.

And the waterfall does not disappoint! With your wellies you can wade into the stream and gaze up at the classic view you may have seen from books, with the water thundering down past the rocky cliffs and under that unlikely stone arch into the pool beneath, the air thronged with drops of water. It's exhilarating.

But the Kieve is more than an interesting natural feature: it's become a pagan shrine. This was certainly not the case some thirty-odd years ago so it would have been interesting to have some more information available about the history of the place, but this doesn't seem to be available. Nevertheless, as you cross the stream and look about you can see how important this place is to people: the walls of the gorge are full of little mementoes of visitors and their loved ones, and in the stream itself are artful piles of stones which are apparently known as 'fairy stacks', not something I've seen anywhere else.

Back at the top of the steps you can also visit St Nectan's Cell, a tiny room underneath the shop complex which has the reputation of being the place where Nectan lived as a hermit in the sixth century. Alternatively it may be no older than the 18th century and the identification as the hermitage ascribable to Fr Hawker of Morwenstow's very active historical imagination, but that doesn't matter as it is now a pagan cult room festooned with ribbons, strings of beads, figurines, interesting pebbles, and records of loved ones and relationships which have the same moving quality that they have in Christian shrines, or indeed those of any other religion. The instinct to commemorate such an immaterial element as love, to turn it into something physical and (at least semi-) permanent, is as strong in this context as it is anywhere else, and carries the same sensation of reverence and sympathy. What, from his now-heavenly perspective, St Nectan makes of it is a different matter.