WHILE I was down in Cornwall to visit some of the sites associated with Arthurian legend, soaking up the atmosphere and feel of these places and of the lovely land- and seascape in which they are set, I paid a visit to the breathtakingly beautiful church and churchyard of St Just in Roseland. Sir John Betjeman was not wrong when he said that it was “to many people the most beautiful churchyard on earth”.

The 13th-century church was itself built on the site of a sixth-century Celtic chapel, and it certainly has the aura of a place in which “prayer had been valid” (as Eliot said of Little Gidding) over many centuries. It feels as though it has been soaked and overlaid in prayer with the same imperturbable rhythm with which the tides come stealing up the creek and lap almost at the foot of the church itself. You can sit on a bench there and wait in silence as the tide gradually lifts and later settles the little boats moored there.

If you are moved by legend as well as history, you can even contemplate the local tradition that it was here that Joseph of Arimathaea brought the child Jesus, who led the crew to the holy well, still brimming in the churchyard, so that they could replenish the Phoenician trading vessel anchored in the creek. Phoenician traders certainly came from the Levant to buy tin from Cornwall in the time of Christ; so the legend is not entirely impossible, if undocumented and unlikely. But locals, steeped in that tradition, will not have it gainsaid.

The church sits at the head of the creek, but it is the churchyard rising into the little combe above and behind it that draws so many visitors and so many gasps of wonder. It was here, in the 19th century, that John Garland Treseder, a pioneer in introducing rare tropical plants and trees to Cornwall, worked in collaboration with the vicar to turn the churchyard into a rich garden, not only with the roses and hawthorn blossom, bluebells, and pink campion that one might expect, but with bamboo and palms, and wonderful exotic blossoming trees and shrubs from Australia and the Far East.

And it was this rich paradisaical luxuriance that made H. V. Morton exclaim, in his 1927 classic In Search of England: “I have blundered into a Garden of Eden that cannot be described in pen or paint. There is a degree of beauty that flies so high that no net of words or no snare of colour can hope to capture it, and of this order is the beauty of St Just in Roseland. . .”

I was there, in part, to touch a place associated with the story of Joseph of Arimathaea, which will be part of the Arthuriad that I am writing, but also to compose a poem for the trust that helps to maintain the gardens, something that might be displayed in the interpretative centre that helps visitors to appreciate all that they are seeing.

Notwithstanding Morton’s assertion that no net of words can fully catch the beauty of the place, I’ll end with a couple of verses from that poem to show that, at least, I tried:

I sit and breathe the scented air
And watch the last light fade
And sense that all the garden here
With heaven is overlaid.

Just as the tide steals up the strand
So sure and quietly
I feel each passing moment here
Bathed in eternity.