Hawkstone Grail
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The Hawkstone Grail is a small stone cup located at Hawkstone Manor in Shropshire, England that is purported to be a Holy Grail by owner Graham Phillips. According to Phillips, archaeologists and historians at the British Museum have identified it as a first century Roman scent jar. However, Phillips cautions that this is not the cup that Jesus' apostles reputedly drank from during the Last Supper because its small size makes it a poor choice for that use. Rather, he believes that this cup could instead have been used to collect a small amount of Jesus' blood as he was dying on the cross or ointments for his body during his temporary internment in the tomb.
In the 18th century, the owner of Hawkstone Manor built a park in the garden. A neighbor and antiquarian named Thomas Wright began adding antiques. In 1920, workmen hired to move some statues located in a cave in the park accidentally broke one of them, and the small cup fell out of a hidden compartment. Believing it to be unremarkable, it was taken to the manor itself and placed among other objects. However, in 2004, Graham Phillips, who was working on a book about King Arthur, identified it as the Holy Grail based on data that suggested Wright had hidden the Grail in the park. Wright had left clues which Phillips deciphered and concluded that the small cup was indeed the cup Wright had written about.
The Hawkstone Grail was featured prominently in The Real Da Vinci Code, a documentary presented by Channel 4 in the United Kingdom in an attempt to debunk author Dan Brown's worldwide bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, which Brown claims is based on actual events and that organizations named in the book are real ones. However, host Tony Robinson appeared unimpressed with the Hawkstone Grail and Phillips' story, stating that "no, we can do better than this."
