*These fictitious old Cornish myths have been heavily readapted for Mevagissey
The Lost Child of Mevagissey
The mysterious happenings surrounding that child of Mevagissey that was lost have lingered on the tongues of the people for generations. You’ll hear fragments of what happened in hushed words at the back of the ship inn; children’s songs at play time and croaky tales of elders. The oldest of the village know the details best, but none know it so intimately as I, for the lost child is of my blood.
My family know better than any that the Lost Child was not abducted by man, nor lost in that wood more than a day. Oh no, he was far more lost than that… He’d wandered into the non-human realm. Into the domain of supernatural beings. Many refer to this as the realm of the ‘small people or piskies’, but let me tell you, not all supernatural beings of the forest are small – far from it – but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Centuries ago, a young boy of our blood wandered into the woods – the place where Heligan is now. He was known for the distant look in his wide green eyes; the vacant expression seemed as fragile as memories of a dream, and yet no amount of disciplinary action from teachers could break it from his face. It was as if he was looking through everything all the time. His father was convinced his son saw and thought nothing at all. He’d say ‘his minds as empty as the harbour at low tide!’. His mother thought his son saw too much; his mind so full at any given moment there was no room for anything more, like too many pilchard in one barrel – do forgive me of relating everything to fishing, in my day we didn’t know of the wider world, like Plymouth and such.
Anyway, this boy liked to walk in green places. He used to come home smelling like flowers, with bits of seed in his hair and green stains on his knees. He spoke of music in the forest, much to the disdain of his father. His father was a blacksmith, and tried to shape his son the way he shaped metal. He drove the boy away, until one day, dropping a trail of tears through the woods, the boy followed the music. Enchanted, he wondered as if asleep, deeper and deeper into the woods, stopping only to pull Ivy from struggling trees or to see how birds behave when they don’t know they’re being watched.
Lured in this way, the red haired boy entered a darker grove, and here, owing to the thick growth of nettles and thorns, he began to think of returning. That is, until the supernatural happenings began…
The music became clearer, it was like rhythmic birdsong but rather than light and chirpy, it had the weight of time behind each note, and an irregular beat like the heart of something ‘other’. He was certain each sound meant something if only he could decipher it. Then, the plants obstructing him began to bend and flatten down all the low and tangled plants, forming for him a meandering narrow path, just the right size for his small body. Above now the heavens flashed with a thick scattering of stars, and the moon crossed the sky and gave way to sunrise every few seconds, at increasing speed. The music ceased and weary from his wanderings, the boy fainted and fell onto a ready made bed of ferns next to a tall weathered stone. The fetal outline of his body in the ferns was seen by his friends who went looking for him, but his body had vanished.
Where was the lost child taken?
This is where fact turns to theory, and your guess is as good as mine – well – maybe not, for I’ve been rather meticulous in my investigations…
I’d say Spriggans are the likely culprit. No doubt pleased with his innocence and the tender care he took to free the trees of the poison ivy which strangled them (for spriggans are inseparable from the trees). It was a gesture the Spriggan’s felt they had to repay, and so they freed him with a song, a song so beautiful that by the end of it, he had forgotten who he was entirely. The spriggans saw in him a human worthy of meeting, and so they opened up their realm before him and drew him in.
Often thought mischievous by those that don’t understand their ways, Spriggans are only so very tempermental because they don’t see the forest like man. Man sees objects, things, where spriggans see the relationships between the things. To a spriggan, the relationship between a tree and the soil is more tangible and significant than the tree or the soil on its own. Their whole language is based around connections rather than things. Spriggan’s can’t comprehend all the silly distinctions man creates to make sense of things. Man can’t see that nothing exists on its own, that’s why they can’t talk to spriggans.
Humans always try to talk to Spriggans as if they’re something ‘other’ than themselves, as if the spriggan is an independent thing. They go out and look for the thing and the harder they look, the further from the Spriggan’s they become. Not so The Lost Child. He didn’t give things names and then think he understood them, he saw what you’d see if you really saw something, without having to cut it up and organize it into categories that make you feel clever.
You might be wondering if you could meet with the Spriggans…
It doesn’t help that air is invisible to man – and time, too. If we could see the trails we leave in time, and how these trails mingle, and if we could see that the air around us doesn’t really create distance between us and everybody else, and everything else, then we’d be able to see and talk to the Spriggans.
Knowing this now, you’ll understand how it’s true that, as his mother always knew, he never left the forest. That’s why some say they hear his laughter in the stream, his gentle breathing in the wind through the leaves, and glimpses of his dream-like gaze in the corner of your eye on the water, which are gone the moment you try to look.
The moment you try to see him independently of everything else in that woods he vanishes, for the Spriggan’s freed him of himself. His ego is dead, but he lives on.