One of the stones at a sacred meeting place near Cubert was taken away to make a cheese press.
Nicholas Roscarrock, a Cornish collector of saints’ stories (more on him shortly), says it was subsequently returned, which is a relief. A cheese press is an impressively practical answer to the question of what to do with an unwanted sacred stone, but it does leave rather a lot of room for a complaint.
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 short time each year, people brought the sacred objects of their own communities to a place they shared.
To find the setting, turn inland from the coast between Newquay and Perranporth. Cubert is the village near Holywell Bay; High Lanes lies to its east. Crantock is nearer the Gannel, St Newlyn East farther inland, and Piran’s old religious sites sit among the dunes towards Perranporth. These are neighbouring places with separate identities. The chapel gave them a reason to come together.
The woman in the cheese-press story was Jane Burlace, a farmer’s wife from nearby Rejerrah, also written Rejarra. And the man who preserved her story had a history of his own.
Roscarrock was a Cornish Catholic who lived through the upheavals of the Reformation and suffered imprisonment and torture in the Tower of London. Later, he compiled lives of British and Irish saints. Religious memory mattered to him in a way that went far beyond finding a colourful anecdote for a local-history page.
His account deserves attention. It also comes from a man with beliefs and loyalties, collecting what others remembered. We are listening to a particular voice, not watching footage from the chapel’s security camera.
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. A published transcription of Roscarrock gives the names in the forms Peran, Crantock, Cuthbert and Newlan; the local church history renders them as Piran, Carantoc, Cubert and Lewlyna.
Rogation week needs unpacking. In the Christian calendar, the days before Ascension were associated with asking for blessing and protection for the land and its produce. Processions often went through the parish landscape. The Church of England’s account of the tradition also connects it with boundaries, neighbourliness and care for the poor. Those are the wider customs; they do not give us a turn-by-turn route for High Lanes.
For people whose food depended on what the surrounding fields produced, prayer for a good growing season addressed something extremely practical. We might open a weather app to decide whether to take a coat. Imagine watching the weather because what it does to the crop could shape the household’s year. The concern is recognisable even if the religious response is unfamiliar.
The image at High Lanes is simple enough to hold in your head. Objects normally associated with different religious centres were brought together and given places beside one another.
The cheese-press episode comes later in that remembered history. Before returning to Jane and her stone, it is worth understanding what the gathering meant.
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. The sacred objects were things people could carry and gather around: a community’s connection to its saint made visible.
For a modern comparison, think of the feeling attached to a village banner, a club crest or the name on a war memorial. None is an exact equivalent to a relic. They simply help explain why an object can matter far beyond its material. To an outsider it might be wood or stone. To somebody else it can carry a whole community.
We do not have the names of the ordinary people who came to this particular gathering. Picture, as an illustration, what the physical act required: leaving your own church, travelling with others, carrying something valued and arriving to find the neighbouring communities there already. A ritual also made a meeting possible. You belonged to somewhere, and other people could see where that was.
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’s story. 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.
When a stone changed jobs
The cheese press gives that shared meaning a wonderfully awkward test. To press cheese, you need pressure. A substantial stone has an obvious practical attraction. The complication is that a neighbour may see a sacred object where you see a useful weight.
By the time Jane is said to have taken it, in or about 1580, England had experienced major religious changes. The gathering Roscarrock remembered belonged to the older Catholic world. Objects could outlast the ceremonies that had given them their place.
That does not tell us why Jane did it. Economy, convenience, indifference, conviction: choosing one would give us an excellent character sketch and very little evidence. The reported return, after her death in November 1582, tells us what sort of story people made of it.
Roscarrock leaves room for a person carrying out her wishes or something taking her appearance. Either way, his account puts the stone back. A belief about how things ought to be has become a story about how they were put right.
I like the friction in it. The grand religious history and the business of running a household occupy the same piece of stone. Somebody has to explain the Reformation; somebody still has to make the cheese.
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. The report’s brief evening of investigation brings another set of people into view: archaeologists trying to record what remained, contractors waiting to continue, and highway authorities making room for that small intervention.
Imagine the difference between those two clocks. The building’s history stretches across centuries. The opportunity to record it is measured in an evening. There is no convenient button marked “pause road construction until we understand the Middle Ages”.
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.
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.
The lost chapel’s position is approximate, and it is now associated with the road rather than a standing ruin to visit. The uncertainty belongs on any map. A confidently misplaced pin would be a rather modern addition to the folklore.
At Crantock, a much larger religious landscape survives in records, burials and archaeological discoveries. The documented lost chapel of St Ambrusca is one part of that landscape. The questions about its college and supposed seven churches continue in Seven Churches Under the Sand?.
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.