Did Jesus visit Cornwall? It sounds beyond belief. But according to local folklore, he sailed here as a teenager with his tin merchant uncle

‘And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green?’ To many, this rousing opening line of England’s unofficial national anthem, Jerusalem, alludes to the idea that during a visit, Jesus briefly created Heaven in this country.

Indeed, William Blake’s 1804 mystical poem, set to music by Hubert Parry, leaves an intriguing enigma that has been hotly discussed over the years – not least at Easter.

The idea that the Son of God made a trip of thousands of miles across treacherous seas and landed in Cornwall after a shipwreck has long been a matter of folklore.

Down the ages, there have been claims in the West Country that Jesus visited the area with His uncle, Joseph of Arimathea.

The suggestion has been laughed off as a wildly improbable myth.

But people from the eastern Mediterranean had visited Cornwall to trade for tin for at least 1,000 years by the time Jesus was born.

Glyn S. Lewis, author of Did Jesus Come To Britain?, has concluded after a lifetime of research that Christ came to our shores twice, visiting Cornwall and Somerset.

And Dr Gordon Strachan, former Church of Scotland minister and Oxford history graduate, went further, stating that Jesus came here as part of His boyhood education and studied sacred geometry and spiritual matters with the druids of ancient Britain at Glastonbury.

Lewis told The Mail on Sunday: ‘The legend that Jesus came here is very strong. It is a historical fact that Christianity came to Cornwall very early on.

‘St Augustine was sent here by Pope Gregory in the 6th Century to convert the English, but when he got to the western part of Britain he found people already worshipping Christ.’

Lewis contends that the link between Jesus and the ancient Celtic-speaking Britons of Cornwall was Joseph of Arimathea – who the gospels say was a prominent and wealthy man and a secret disciple of Jesus.

He retrieved Jesus’s crucified body for burial on Good Friday.

Some ancient texts suggest that Joseph was an uncle of the Virgin Mary and made his fortune as a merchant dealing in metals. It is this that is said to have taken him to Cornwall, which since the Bronze Age was Europe’s best source of tin – much sought-after as it is alloyed with copper to make bronze.

Ancient historians such as Herodotus recorded that the Phoenicians sailed from the ports of Tyre and Sidon – little more than 50 miles from Nazareth – to islands off the west coast of Europe via the Straits of Gibraltar.

However, the Phoenicians jealously guarded the secret of the source of their tin, and ancient Greek and Roman accounts are vague as to the islands’ location.

In 2019, scientific analysis of pure tin ingots recovered from Bronze Age shipwrecks off the coast of Israel proved that the metal had been mined in Cornwall.

Traditionally, Christians have assumed the young Jesus was a carpenter in Nazareth, alongside His father Joseph, and dismiss claims that He ever travelled outside what is now the Holy Land.

But Lewis and Dr Strachan disagreed. They have claimed that Jesus travelled to Britain – an experience that helped Him develop His extraordinary wisdom.

Both men combed the West Country for ancient legends featuring Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea, who in Arthurian mythology was the original bearer of the Holy Grail – the vessel that held Christ’s blood – and brought it to Glastonbury.

For Lewis, among key clues is an intricately carved stone arch over the door of the now-disused St Anthony’s Church in Cornwall’s beautiful Roseland peninsula.

‘The building has signs of being something other than a church in Phoenician times,’ he said. ‘The church was originally a trading post for tin.’

The 1,000-year-old arch has a series of carved pictographs which are said to have been copied from Phoenician wood carvings.

Lewis said the carvings were first interpreted by an archaeologist in the 1970s, who claimed they told of Jesus’s birth and His visit to Cornwall, and that they are the first documented proof of the local legend that Jesus visited Cornwall with Joseph. It is said that their ship foundered on the rocks of St Anthony’s Head and they were rescued by Phoenician sailors trading with the local people.

Lewis said: ‘The Phoenicians carved an account of the incident in wood with the date. It was this that was copied on to the stone arch.’

He added that the travelling uncle and nephew possibly went looking for fresh water in Padstow.

‘If you follow the little white markers by the golf course,’ Lewis explained, ‘you’ll find Jesus Well. There is no other place called Jesus Well in Britain. People in the Middle Ages took their children there to be cured of disease.’

Local legend has it that Joseph and Jesus also went to Ding Dong Mine near Madron which, even then, had been operating for centuries.

Lewis believes that on a later visit, Joseph and Jesus went north, up the coast of Devon and Somerset to Burnham and Weston-super-Mare, and then by log boat through the flooded Somerset levels, trading Baltic beads and amber for tin.

‘When Joseph was trading, Jesus had time to spare. It’s thought He went to Glastonbury to a Druidic school. The Druids believed in atonement and someone dying for sin. The death of Jesus on the Cross as atonement for sin would have been readily accepted by them.

‘There is no record of the Druids opposing Christianity and, in fact, they were absorbed into it because of this doctrine of atonement, which is what Easter is all about.’

It’s widely recognised that, in the 13th Century, the medieval monks of Glastonbury played up the legend of Joseph of Arimathea’s ‘visit’ to raise the status of their abbey and boost the lucrative pilgrim trade.

But the legend long predates the abbey. Historical accounts mention a church on the site in the 10th Century. And research by University of Reading archaeologists found fragments of high-status Roman pottery dating back to 450 AD – showing that buildings with trade links to the Mediterranean existed on the site for at least half a millennium before the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon monastery.

Undoubtedly, the truth as to whether Jesus visited the South West of England will never be proved. There will be endless debates about mysterious hieroglyphs and ancient place names said to be evidence. But few experts took seriously the local legend in County Antrim that a Spanish Armada galleon had been wrecked on their shores until the late 1960s, when divers discovered treasure from the Armada ship Girona at a site the locals had known for 400 years as ‘Spanish Rocks’.

Lewis insists the legends are rooted in fact. ‘There’s a conflict between people who say “If it’s not in the Bible, I can’t really accept it” and those who say, “Well, where was He for 18 years when He was growing up?” ‘

But there is no doubt that Christianity was seeded in Cornwall. Churches sprang up in the South West far earlier than in any other part of Britain, and by the time St Augustine arrived in 597 AD, there was a thriving church community.

Whatever the truth, whenever anyone sings the first two stanzas of Jerusalem, they are patriotically voicing the belief that Jesus Christ travelled to England – where He built a Holy Land.