A Tintagel Tale

Eleven-year-old Tillie expects a family holiday in Cornwall to mean windswept ruins, rainy afternoons and listening to her archaeologist mother and historian father debate what the past can really prove.She does not expect to find Jowan.Hidden beneath a stone at Tintagel Castle is an injured, sharp-tongued Cornish piskie with no wings, a talent for trouble and very definite opinions about humans.Tillie does the only thing that seems reasonable.She hides him in her rucksack.But when Jowan accidentally travels back to Bude with her family, Tillie discovers that another Cornwall exists beneath the familiar one.Ancient paths remember footsteps that vanished centuries ago. Mine tunnels answer with three mysterious knocks. Strange lights move through the darkness. The sea keeps bargains of its own. And sometimes, when Jowan takes Tillie by the hand, the modern world falls away and Cornwall remembers what once stood there.Then Jowan begins to forget.At first it is small things-a word, an offering, a place.Then roads disappear from his memory.Names vanish.And eventually, even the people he loves begin slipping away.Armed with the battered green diary her mother bought her at Tintagel, Tillie becomes determined to record everything before it is lost. Her search takes her deeper into Old Cornwall, where piskies, Knockers, forgotten paths, ancient stories and the powers belonging to Cornwall’s cliffs, mines and sea are far more complicated than the legends humans have written about them.But Tillie soon discovers that forgetting isn’t the only danger.Some roads disappeared for a reason.Some stories have been remembered incorrectly.And bringing the past back without understanding it can have consequences for the present.As the boundary between history, folklore and something much older begins to break down, Tillie must decide what should be remembered, what should be allowed to fade-and whether saving someone means holding on to them or knowing when to let them go.At the heart of everything is an unlikely friendship between an eleven-year-old girl and a frightened, stubborn, mischievous Cornish piskie who lives by one simple rule:You don’t leave the lost.A Tintagel Tale: The Discovery of a Cornish Pixie is a magical adventure through Tintagel, Bude, Boscastle and an older Cornwall hidden beneath them-a story of friendship, memory, history and the strange places where fact becomes folklore and folklore becomes something that might just be true.Some places remember.And some friendships never truly fade. 6