Inspiration: St Piran

I had never heard of St Piran before I moved to Cornwall and I had some huge gaps in my understanding of Christianity and some of the part it placed in the history of the British Isles before I moved to Cornwall.  I grew up in the heartlands of England and I knew Scotland, Wales and Ireland had different history to England to a limited extent but it was not really taught in school.  Many of the difficult and divisive parts of our history were completely ignored.

The IRA's bombing campaign was part of my childhood.  I knew to look for unattended possessions in public places and not to leave anything of mine behind.  Every Friday my Dad would be in London for work, driving around.  We all kept an eye on the news on Fridays and that continued until he retired.  Despite all this, I was never taught the roots of the conflict in history.  It was actually my English teacher that caused me to start to understand. She asked us to do a debate on Ireland and I did my research using the schools encyclopaedia's.  I was horrified when I learnt of the potato famine...  Even more horrified when my classmates thought I was making it up in the debate and laughed.

The consciousness slowly seems to have changed and Scotland's fight against the English has definitely taken a place in mainstream culture thanks to Mel Gibson in Braveheart and more recently, Jamie Fraser in Outlander.  Scotland and Wales now have their own assemblies with political power and it makes a strong statement of their differences from England.

Cornwall though is smaller with a lower population and it's right to be scene as different to England has been slower.  Cornish is now an option on censuses though and there is a greater appreciation of the Cornish as being a distinct people now than there was when I first moved here. 

The Tamar River flows along the border of Devon and Cornwall, joining the sea on the south coast while it's source is only 4 miles from the north coast up near Bude.  As a well a physical boundary, genetic studies have shown that the river forms a distinct genetic boundary too, with the Cornish being completely different.

The Cornish are one of the Celtic nations which are Scotland, Wales, Ireland, The Isle of Mann and Brittany in France.  These areas retained languages and cultural traits from the Celts while England did not.  When Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, it reached the British Isles too.  When the Empire fell, the islands fell in to the Dark Ages, so called because the history is harder to piece together.  The Celtic nations retained much of their Christianity while England did not.  

Devout people from Ireland, Wales and Cornwall would still travel on pilgrimages.  Welsh and Irish pilgrims would travel by boat from Wales to the north coast of Cornwall and then walk to the south coast before traveling again by boat to the continent.  The Saints Way is one such route that remains in Cornwall going from Padstow to Fowey via Luxulyan, but there were others.

The Christianity that remained was much more representative of the Christianity that initially existed and it organically adopted the pagan practices and landscape of those in the Celtic nations because they were in charge of their own faith.  When the Roman Catholic Empire turned it's sights to Britain, it couldn't ignore the existing bastions of Christianity, so all the slightly paganish things were retained rather than upset existing Christian territories.  England lost much more of it's pagan landscape.

The power of the Roman Catholic Empire can not be understated.  They ruled Europe without having to worry too much about the actual business of running things in a way.  When Henry the Eighth removed the Catholic Church from his territory, I don't think it would have just been about his desire to divorce...  Without the Catholic Church and the much more relaxed Church of England, the United Kingdoms became a place where different forms of Anglican Christianity thrived.  

John Wesley was born in 1703 and he founded the Methodist church.  He liked to preach outdoors and talked of love  and was one of the first to talk of rights for slaves.  Although he travelled all over the country, the Cornish in particular took his words to heart.  It appealed to the farmers, fishermen and miners and they would gather in their thousands to hear him.  Gwennap Pit is a local landmark where he used to preach which is a depression in the ground which has circular terraces cut in to it.  It is said as many as 2,000 people could be sat to listen but maybe more thousands could gather around the pit.  It is said that Wesley preached to 32,000 people in 1773 at Gwennap Pit.

So to me, the Christian landscape of Cornwall felt different before I understood why.  The Church of England churches I grew up with are much less common here but there are many many simple blocky chapels.  Many places are named after obscure saints you would never have heard of anywhere else.  Many traditions with hints of paganism remained mainstream such as Helston's Flora Day, Padstow's Obby Oss and Penzance's Montol.  The landscape is littered with holy springs and remnants of long ago times.

This probably explains some of the weird and wonderful legends associated with St Piran, patron saint of Cornwall and tin miners.  He was Irish but was thrown out by heathens who tied him to a mill stone and threw him in the sea.  The stormy seas subsided and he floated safely to Cornwall where he landed on a long sandy beach and established himself as a hermit in the sand dunes.  He was venerated locally and began to attract followers until he established the Abbey of Lanpiran.  It is said that the secret of smelting tin had been lost with Romans and St Piran rediscovered it by accident when his black hearthstone ended up with white tin on the surface which gives rise to his black flag with a white cross.

The bay he landed on has the town of Perranporth at one end and the village of Holywell at the other.  His oratory remained in use until the tenth century when it was buried by the sands.  A new church was built but this was also eventually buried in the 1800s.  It may be difficult to imagine but the sand dunes were not anchored by Maram Grass at that time.  Sir Walter Raleigh was friends with a family who had lands in the bay that were constantly in danger of being engulfed and he brought maram grass back from his travels and gifted it to them.  Our sand dunes still move but not as drastically...  

The Oratory was the subject of an archaeological dig and entombed in a concrete bunker for it's safety before being reburied.  Every year, on March the 5th, St Piran's Day a procession goes across the sand to the site of the oratory.

I have read that some of the stories associated with Cornwall's diverse saints were likely stories of pagan deities that were merged organically with the local christian faith.  The Roman Catholic church adopted all of these saints, unlikely origins and all. 

For my St Piran pinterest board, click here!