For much of the last century and a half, people who were ill travelled to Nanteos, the Powell family's house near Aberystwyth, to drink from a small, dark, broken wooden bowl. Accounts from 1895 speak of it being used especially for women's complaints.
The story told about it was this. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1539, the last monks of Strata Florida Abbey, a few miles away in the Teifi valley, fled with their greatest treasure, a cup said to be made from the wood of the True Cross. They found refuge with the Powells at Nanteos and left the cup in their keeping, where it worked healing wonders ever after. In 1905 a writer, Ethelwyn Amery, went further and declared it to be the Holy Grail itself, the cup of the Last Supper.
The folklorist Juliette Wood traced the cup's history and found no credible mention of it before 1878, when George Powell exhibited it, and no Grail connection before 1905. Specialists have identified it as a mazer, a medieval drinking bowl, made of wych elm in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Its adventures continued into this century: it was stolen in 2014 from a house in Herefordshire where it was being kept, recovered in 2015 after a Crimewatch appeal, and since 2016 has been on display at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.
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