Cornwall is a land like no other where a Celtic culture struggles to hold its own against the onslaught of the twenty-first century. The Pengilleys are very much part of that modern life and hardly stop to consider their own roots-until Grandad dies and leaves a chest of dusty papers and an old pot.

The ensuing journey to uncover this strange past soon finds the family tied across more than two hundred years to Jacka, Mary, and their three children, living in a tiny village on the rugged coast of West Cornwall. The Pengilleys of the late eighteenth century battled poverty, dangerous mines, and the eradication of their whole way of life by a new language taking hold in their parish-English.

Jacka sets about a plan to save his family and cultural heritage but faces challenges which break his heart and nearly cost him his own life. Can his descendants decode the puzzle he left in the Cornish language which, by the twenty-first century, lay beneath the surface-like a hidden city?