Myths & Folklore

The Lost Child of Mevagissey

My family know better than any that the Lost Child was not taken by a man, nor lost in that wood for more than a day. He was far more lost than that. He had wandered into the non-human realm.

People call it the domain of the small people, the piskies. Let me tell you: not all supernatural beings of the forest are small. Far from it. But I am getting ahead of myself.

A boy who looked through things

Centuries ago a boy of our blood walked into the woods — where Heligan is now. He was known for the distant look in his wide green eyes, an expression as fragile as the memory of a dream, and no amount of discipline from teachers could shift it.

His father was certain the boy saw and thought nothing at all: his mind's as empty as the harbour at low tide, he would say. His mother thought he saw too much — that his mind was so full at any moment there was no room for more, like too many pilchard in one barrel.

He liked green places, and came home smelling of flowers with seed in his hair and green on his knees. He spoke of music in the forest, which his father, a blacksmith who tried to shape his son the way he shaped metal, could not stand. He drove the boy away, until one day the boy followed the music into the trees, stopping only to pull ivy off struggling trees, or to watch how birds behave when they do not know they are watched.

What happened in the grove

In a darker grove, thick with nettle and thorn, he began to think of turning back. That is when it started.

The music came clearer — like birdsong, but with the weight of time behind each note and an irregular beat, like the heart of something other. He was certain every sound meant something, if only he could read it. Then the plants bent and flattened themselves into a narrow path, just the size of his small body. Above him the sky filled with stars and the moon crossed and gave way to sunrise every few seconds, faster and faster. The music stopped. Weary, he fell onto a ready-made bed of ferns beside a tall weathered stone.

His friends found the shape of him pressed into the ferns. The boy himself was gone.

Where he went, and why you cannot look for it

Here fact turns to theory, and your guess is as good as mine — though I have been meticulous in my investigations.

Spriggans, I would say. Pleased with his innocence, and with the care he took freeing the trees of the ivy that strangled them; spriggans and trees are inseparable. It was a kindness they felt they had to repay, so they freed him with a song — a song so beautiful that by the end of it he had forgotten who he was entirely.

They are thought mischievous by people who do not understand them. Spriggans are only tempermental because they do not see a forest the way a man does. Man sees objects, things. A spriggan sees the relationships between things: to one of them, the relationship between a tree and the soil is more real than either the tree or the soil. Their whole language is built of connections rather than nouns.

That is why people cannot talk to them. They go looking for the spriggan as a thing, separate from themselves, and the harder they look the further off it gets. Not the Lost Child. He never named a thing and then believed he understood it.

So his mother was right: he never left the forest. Some say they hear his laughter in the stream, his breathing in the wind through the leaves, and catch his dream-like gaze at the edge of the water — gone the moment you look straight at it. The moment you try to see him apart from everything else in that wood, he vanishes. The spriggans freed him of himself.