The Lost Church of St Piran

This is a photo I took many yeas ago of St Piran's Oratory near Perranporth Cornwall. Alas it is now under the sand. Maintenance became so costly that Cornwall County Council decided to bury the remains of the ancient little Church. A large granite plaque marks the spot where the Oratory is buried.

The small oratory dedicated to St. Piran (circa 450AD) was abandoned because of encroaching sand in the 10th century.

A new church was built nearby to replace the oratory as the church of the local people. The replacement church had a stream protecting it from the sands, which did its job, until tin mining caused the stream to dry up, and allow the sands to engulf this building in 1804.
It grew from a small church to a collegiate church by the 12th century. By 14th century hundreds of pilgrims visited the church on their way to Compostella in Spain. This was probably due to the head of St Piran being kept in a silver casket in the church.

The photo above the one of the Oratory is of the recently excavated site of the Church that replaced the oratory. This was done in 2005 by the St Piran Trust.

The dig involved moving around 250 tons of sand from the interior of the church, and related works to the outside. Turf was removed at the chancel end of the church and build up of earth and grass removed from the walls.

The Celtic Church of which St Piran was a typical example lived close to Nature. Nature was also a source of God's revelation.

To-day we tend to speak of nature as if it were the preserve of either the environmentalists or the romantic. It is almost as if Nature was an extension of our living room to be regulated, monitored and serviced at regular intervals. Either that or she is mentioned in soft tones verging on the sentimental and nostalgic.

Both of these attitudes, the conservationist and the sentimental run the danger of depriving the natural world of its own power and vigour…ultimately of God.

Nature still bears an awesome majesty, a grandeur and unpredictability, that until recently has struck terror into the hearts of men. Our centrally heated and comfortable homes may protect us from the raw experience of wild Nature, but Nature has a way of confounding us. Insulated by glass and concrete, by cities and cars and streets and planes, our ancient fear of Nature has gone underground. It has been driven into the subterranean alleys of the unconscious.

For our ancestors, the voice or vision of God would leap out of a storm-cloud, or would appear in the desert. It would strike into the heart with a bolt of lightening or it would speak on a mountain top, far above the tame and populated towns. Moses knew all about that when God spoke to him on Mount Sinai. (Exodus 19).That was no vicarage tea party or church social.

The feelings of awe and dread are holy feelings because they bring us into the presence of the numinous, of the Almighty and the unknowable. It is in wild Nature that these feelings might be experienced. The utilities of domestication blind us to the awe that our forbearer’s experienced.

The world – “out there,” the clouds, rivers and oceans, the land and animals is highly unpredictable. It can feed and give pleasure, but it can also kill violently. Those who imagine God only as a father protector may find it difficult to imagine that Nature could also be a revelation of God and a source of spirituality. The ancient Israelites were well acquainted with the untamed God who led them from slavery in Egypt.
Hidden amidst all our present day denominations, our so called beliefs, is a natural religious impulse that is sacred and a rich source of wonder and revelation.

I’ve done a fair amount of camping and trekking in wild places. But there are wild places on our doorstep here in Cornwall. All we have to do is get out and walk. I say this from the personal experience of tramping around my native Cornwall. The external environment can evoke the presence of God. It is though one was a prayer winding along pathways and tracks. God is everywhere and in everything. All we have to do is to open up to him in all the wonders of Nature that surround us.

The walk from the National Trust Car-Park at Holywell Bay to the Lost Church of St Piran

is superb and an experience to be repeated many times.

Real walking as a recreational practice over long periods gradually breaks down the hard edges separating the ego (or I) from the environment. Consciousness begins to merge into landscape and vice versa.