Blood and Water: The Nanteos Grail on Trial - Waterstones Launch, Friday 19th of May, 7 pm

Upstairs at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, in a glass case, lies the Nanteos Cup. Broken and brittle it's nothing but a piece of ancient wood. Yet, when I went to visit it, a woman rose from her knees, turned and hurried away. Displayed with it are the scraps of paper left by the desperate people who borrowed the cup over time, leaving things valuable to them as security and testimonials as to the efficacy of the water drank from the cup. Some of the people couldn't write, notes created for them by members of the Powell Family, the keepers of the healing cup for generations. Ian Pegler, co- author of The Nanteos Grail launches his new book this Friday at Waterstones in Aberystwyth. The object is surrounded in myth and mystery. Legend has it that it was brought for safe-keeping to the previous mansion on the Nanteos site - either straight from Glastonbury or by way of Abaty Ystrad Fflur during the Reformation. In my Nanteos novels The Shadow of Nanteos and Nanteos: The Dipping Pool I explore a different legend - that of the Stedman Family of Mynachlog Fawr, a minor gentry family who lived next to the Abbey at Ystrad Fflur and who were keepers of the Grail until they paid it as part of a debt to the Powell Family of Nanteos in the mid Eighteenth Century. Written records attesting to the vessel at Nanteos are only reliable from the Nineteenth Century where it began to be explored by historians and antiquarians.

So where was it before then and what is it?

Major archaeological work at Abaty Ystrad Fflur has discovered a previously unknown well in the centre of the site. Was the cup used to give holy water from the spring to pilgrims?

Mystery surrounds this object. There are several reproductions in existence and I saw one presented at Plas Nanteos mansion in the late 70s. There is one there now. There are rumours that the cup on display in the National Library, ( the object stolen from the owner, a distant relative of the famous Powells of Nanteos and the subject of Crimewatch), though old, is not the Nanteos Cup. I've heard strange claims indeed: that the original was hidden at Nanteos before its recent conversion to a hotel. If so , where is it now? Testimony from a recent resident of the grand old farm - the 'Stedman House' or Mynachlog Fawr, that the Grail cup was still at the property when he was a boy and he remembers it on the mantle piece , always worrying that it would fall into the fire and be lost forever.

Plas Nanteos, known as one of the most haunted houses in Wales is enigmatic; atmospheric. The presence of the healing cup, that some believe to be the Holy Grail, only adds to this air of mystery and to the appeal of the Powell family, as keepers of the cup.

Come and join us for drinks at Waterstones as I interview Ian about his new book, leaving plenty of time for discussion and questions from the floor. Tickets £5 on the door or in advance from the store.