Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/271

 FROM HAYLE TO PERRAN 205 dunes, and a vague floating rumour of an immemorial past. In fog or grey weather the spot can be dreary, weird, desolate ; but in times of fair sunrise or sundown it is glorified with a marvellous beauty, with restful nooks where a dreamer may enter upon a heritage of beatific vision. St. Piran, the dominant personality of the district, is the patron of the tin-miners, but neither they nor others know much about him ; he is a ghost of the far past, but a ghost with a dim halo around his head. He belongs to the sixth century, and was therefore a little later than the saints of the Land's End country. In Ireland he is reputed as St. Kieran of Saigir, but the British Celts, according to their usual custom, changed the Gaelic K into P. His Irish record is much more full than his Cornish, but it must not delay us, except to remember that he rescued an Irish girl, Bruinsech, from a chief who had kidnapped her, and that she travelled to Cornwall, probably in his company, to become the Buriena of St. Buryan. Piran is said to have journeyed across the seas on a millstone, which is a mythical way of saying that he brought his altar-stone with him. He is sup- posed to have landed on these drifting sands that perpetuate his name, and to have founded his first cell here, the oratory that still remains in much mutilated ruin among the towans of Perran. So far as site is concerned, this may be true enough ; but the oratory, whose bare foundations are now surrounded by a sheltering rail, is probably at least two centuries later than the day of St. Piran, though it is just possible that the huge skeleton found here might be his. There is no reason why a saint may not also be