Perranporth

Made famous by the BBC’s exciting Seaside Rescue series, Perranporth, isn’t just a place for drama. It’s also a classic bucket and sand beach, and rich with cultural value. The Millennium Sundial, stands standing by the beach, it tells Cornish time, which is twenty minutes ahead of GMT. It’s no exaggeration to say that the history and development of Perranporth have been quite unusually dominated by sand. Buried beneath the extensive sand dunes here is The Oratory of St Piran, the patron saint of tin mining, and, arguably, of Cornwall as a whole. The oratory became overwhelmed by sand sometime before 1500, f. Following its excavation in the last century, it had to be reburied in 1981 in order to better preserve it for posterity. Legend has it that when the remains were uncovered, three headless skeletons were also discovered. Reburied today, a simple plaque marks the site of the burial place of the saint who is said to have travelled from Ireland to Cornwall on a millstone. The saint’s landing place is marked by a tall granite cross, St Piran’s Cross, which is one of only a very few three-holed Celtic crosses in the county.

The name of the parish in which Perranporth is located is called Perranzabuloe, which translates into English as ‘Perran-in-the-sands’, and gives its name to the local museum, the Perranzabuloe Folk Museum, located in the town’s Ponsmere Road. It has local collections on archaeology, science and social history. For most people, however, Perranporth will forever be linked with Winston Graham, the author of the Poldark novels. Born in Manchester, Graham settled in Perranporth in the 1930s and, while staying here, wrote the first volumes in the series, which were published between 1945 and 1953. Local beauty spots, towns, villages and various old mine workings all appear either as themselves or in disguise in the books and, in some cases, his characters take their names from local villages.

In mid-October Perranporth hosts the Lowender Peran Celtic Festival, which takes place in the Ponsmere Hotel. The festival celebrates traditional and contemporary music, stories and songs in the Cornish language, and Cornwall’s links with other Celtic cultures in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Brittany are emphasized with groups and performers arriving from all of those regions.