OUR story earlier this month of schoolboy explorer Stephen Holmes’ ‘discovery’ of Robin Hood’s grave in summer, 1955, reached Dave Jones in Hermanus, South Africa.

Hermanus, a beautiful town on the Indian Ocean 80km or so from Cape Town and a whale-watchers’ paradise, is a far cry both in distance and time from Kirklees.

But Dave has fond memories of it.

“From 1947 every summer holiday for many years I came from London to stay with friends in Clifton village,” he said.

“I think it was in 1948 that a group of us went down the Hartshead road to see the grave.

“We went on to see the dead yew tree from which Robin Hood was supposed to have cut his arrows, and the ‘guest house’ (of Kirklees Priory) where he was supposed to have fired his last arrow.”

Dave recalls a story that the railings that surrounded the grave on the Kirklees estate were put there to stop railway navvies chipping bits off as a cure for toothache.

He’s puzzled as to why the grave’s epitaph was in 13th century English when it was erected in 1750, and suggests that George Armytage, who built the grave, copied the inscription from an earlier stone.

“The grave being empty would not be such a surprise as after all, Robin was buried in ‘hostile’ ground,” Dave surmises.

“So possibly his friends removed him soon after burial. Or the state, so that his grave wouldn’t become a place of pilgrimage.”

We may never know.