One of the stones at a sacred meeting place near Cubert was taken away to make a cheese press.

It was subsequently returned, which is a relief.

That small detail is part of a much larger story about a chapel at High Lanes, east of Cubert. The chapel has gone, but the record attached to it gives us one of the strongest connections between St Piran’s dunes, Cubert, Crantock and St Newlyn East.

For a collection of articles which began with separate places, it is an exceptionally useful crossroads.

Four communities in one place

The chapel was known as St Nighton’s, or St Nectan’s. Cornwall’s Historic Environment Record preserves an account by Nicholas Roscarrock, writing around 1600, of four stones on a small mound in its yard.

Crosses and relics from the neighbouring communities were placed there during Rogation week, in a practice remembered into Queen Mary’s reign. The local church history names the saints as Piran, Carantoc, Cubert and Lewlyna.

The image is simple enough to hold in your head. Objects normally associated with different religious centres were brought together and given places beside one another.

Then, according to Roscarrock’s account as summarised in the record, one of the stones was removed in 1580 for the cheese press and later brought back.

I rather like that intrusion of ordinary life. A sacred object could also be a very useful piece of stone. The return suggests its other meaning had survived the practical enthusiasm.

The saints did not have to meet

The gathering belongs to the history of medieval devotion. It does not require Piran, Carantoc and Cubert to have known one another in person.

That distinction opens the story up. A saint could become a powerful presence in a community centuries after the period assigned to his life. A relic, cross or shrine gave that connection a physical form.

The processions remembered at High Lanes brought those identities into the same place.

Piran’s own biography is much harder to recover than the religious history attached to his name. His millstone arrival and tin-making legend are part of St Piran: The Saint Who Floated to Cornwall — and the History Beneath the Legend. Here, the question concerns the people who carried his memory through the landscape.

Cubert’s church history gives a general fifteenth-century account of occasions when the relics were brought together. The archaeological record, drawing on Roscarrock, specifies Rogation week. That is the more precise account to follow while retaining the distance between a remembered ceremony and a contemporary description of it.

A chapel beneath the road

The site also has a history in documents and excavated material.

The Historic Environment Record cites bequests in 1470 and 1503 and later references to the chapel in parish boundaries. In September 1968, road construction prompted a small rescue excavation.

The notice in Cornish Archaeology describes a short evening’s work, with the contractors and highway authorities allowing investigation before the ground was lost. What appeared to be the western end of the chapel was cleared and planned. The surviving wall and pottery ridge tiles suggested a fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century date.

Much of the building had already gone.

By the 1970 OS inspection, the site was beneath the new road. Even the location needs a little care: the excavation notice and the later record give differing approximate grid references.

It is a rather compressed afterlife for a place which once brought communities together. The chapel disappears, the road goes over it, and the evidence survives in a short excavation report.

A stone slab is reused as a cheese-press weight.
A building's stone may have a second working life. Editorial image.

Walking the connection now

Seven Bridges provides a modern route through the landscape south of Cubert towards the dunes. It is a natural way to connect these stories in the present.

It has not been established as the route taken by the relic processions to High Lanes. We can enjoy the geographical connection without making the footpath carry an unsupported medieval pedigree.

At Crantock, a much larger religious landscape survives in records, burials and archaeological discoveries. The questions about its college and supposed seven churches continue in Seven Churches Under the Sand? The Crantock Story That Keeps Changing.

The crossroads makes those neighbouring histories feel less separate. People had their own parish, their own church and their own saint, while also sharing occasions beyond those boundaries.

Four stones on a mound are a modest physical arrangement for such a substantial idea.

One of them apparently made a serviceable cheese press, too.

Sources and further reading

Keep exploring