May 12, 2004

» Where is the Holy Grail? Staffordshire? Or Herefordshire? Or, y'know, perhaps somewhere in the Middle East would make sense.

Staffordshire: Carved on the base of the Shepherd's Monument, a white marble arbor at Shugborough Hall, the letters are D.O.U.O. S.V.A.V.V.M. and they have been flummoxing some of the nation's finest minds since they were put there circa 1748. Charles Darwin is said to have had a stab at decoding them, so too the local bigwig Josiah Wedgwood - both to no avail.

The mystery surrounding the uneven row of letters is seasoned with some big rumours, the most dramatic being that they may actually point to the Holy Grail. So Shugborough - the ancestral home of Lord Lichfield - has now drafted in Bletchley Park and its Second World War code-breakers.

Herefordshire: And then there are those who are convinced it is lodged in a much less romantic resting place - the vault of a branch of Lloyds TSB bank somewhere in Herefordshire, taken there for safe-keeping from its last home - a grand, if fly-blown, house in west Wales.

It is a long and winding road to Nanteos Mansion. One must cross the Black Mountains and the Cambrian Mountains and negotiate the Devil Bridge Gorges before dropping down into the soft, remote countryside of lowland Ceredigion (Cardiganshire).

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For the next two centuries the cup stood behind glass, apparently performing miracles and attracting pilgrims by the hundred. Richard Wagner - who wrote the Grail opera Parsifal - made a visit to see it at the invitation of the then heir to the house, George Powell, a masochistic homosexual with a fondness for the birch and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Powell, who was friends with the poet Algernon Swinburne and fed roast monkey flesh to Guy de Maupassant, believed that the cup possessed miraculous healing powers. Water poured into it was sent around the world to those afflicted with various diseases and ailments.