The Sisters of Glen Nectan
Robert Stephen Hawker
It is from Nectan's mossy steep
The foamy waters flash and leap;
It is where shrinking wild-flowers grow
They lave the nymph that dwells below.
But wherefore in this far-off dell
The reliques of a human cell,
Where the sad stream and lonely wind
Bring man no tidings of his kind?
"Long years agone," the old man said,—
'Twas told him by his grandsire dead,—
"One day two ancient sisters came;
None there could tell their race or name.
"Their speech was not in Cornish phrase.
Their garb had signs of loftier days;
Slight food they took from hands of men,
They withered slowly in that glen.
"One died,—the other's sunken eye'
Gushed till the fount of tears was dry;
A wild and withering thought had she,
'I shall have none to weep for me.'
"They found her silent at the last.
Bent in the shape wherein she passed,
Where her lone seat long used to stand,
Her head upon her shrivelled hand."
Did fancy give this legend birth,—
The grandame's tale for winter hearth?
Or some dead bard, by Nectan's stream,
People these banks with such a dream?
We know not; but it suits the scene
To think such wild things here have been:
What spot more meet could grief or sin
Choose, at the last, to wither in?
The waterfall of St Nectan's Kieve falls 60 feet into a pool between the wooded banks of Glen Nectan. At the top of the waterfall is an old hermitage, said to be built where Saint Nectan had his hermit's cell in the sixth century.
