Kernow Kev, Hobbling Haunted & Mysterious Cornwall - Perranzabuloe

St Piran’s Cross. And so he bleddy well should be, if legend is to be believed. Being tied to a granite millstone and flung from an Irish cliff, all because he objected to King Aengus' horny desires to ditch his old bint of a queen and get his grubby little hands on a younger model. What religious figure wouldn’t be a tad narked off at that? I mean, morals, right? Still, what a fortunate landing, the idyllic stretch of golden sand that is Perranzabuloe Beach, in Kernow.

Wanting to catch the sunrise over the sands and scrubland for this little jaunt, thus adding a mystical atmosphere to satisfyingly freak myself out, I headed into the chill darkness of a February morning. Grabbing my trusty Nikon, along with my crutches, I hobbled to the car and made the short drive from Aggie. Being a man with gnarled ankles and diminishing muscles - and therefore slow as a sloth - I had to arrive at the start of the path while the sky was still a moonlit black, the fading stars striving to outdo each other in a dazzling, twinkling Narcissus performance.

I had no idea how far the Cross was from the roadside where I’d snuggled the car into the hedge. To be completely honest with you, I had only the vaguest notion of even which direction it lay in. On that note, if you’re planning to visit, I started on the furthest path from the top of Budnic Hill (the hill with the golf course and Perran Sands Holiday Park on). Take a left at the top of the hill, signposted Smugglers Den, past a few parking bays on the left until you get to an unsigned junction. Park up there, and once on the path, just keep to the right as best you can. Anyway, with strides, struggles and baby steps I trekked through tight and winding muddy tracks, past trees that had lived their whole desolate lives in the path of the relentless Atlantic winds – leaning like I used to on a Friday and Saturday…Sunday, Monday, Tuesday…night in my youth (God bless Captain Blood's Tavern). In some ways my journey here was just like St Piran’s: he fell (was pushed) from a cliff; I twisted my ankle in a rabbit hole. The only real difference there is that he landed on saltwater, I landed on sand and wiry grass. He needed a drink when he arrived (the stories all sound like he was a wee bit of a pisshead), and I needed a drink for Dutch courage, every scurrying and whimpering sound causing me to near soil myself - anyone who knows me will know I can be a proper gobby bugger, yet entirely lack the balls to back up my runaway mouth.

Navigating with greater caution around the many other holes and pits, dug by an array of animals with the unified intention of making me look a tit, on many occasions my legs felt like they were about to pack in. I’d stop and drop my backside onto the dew-glistening tufts of spear-like wild grasses, look ahead at barren nothingness, then look back at the course I had trampled, wondering if I could even make it back to the car from where I slouched.

As you can see from the photos, I made it. As I first spotted what I thought had to be the thousand-year-old Cross in the distance, I had to catch my breath. Feelings of awe and intense spiritualism were overwhelming. To think that, hundreds of years ago, this legend literally rocked up and taught the Gospel just to the left of that spot to hordes of sun and rain worshiping Cornish folk, converting them and embracing them as his Christian brethren. The place he laboured to build his little Oratory – the oldest Christian church in the whole of Britain, buried for centuries by shifting sandstorms and now slowly being unearthed once again by the elements. When I arrived at the eight-foot column of stone with its weathered, rounded head, the sky was lightening to a steely-blue, but as yet there was no hint of the deep tangerine glow I was hoping to spy on the horizon. So, I sat on the cold ground, and I waited, listening to the sound of the early morning breeze crawling through the rough and tangled foliage. All the while I became steadily more creeped out by the enormity of the solitude, and the thought of the mostly buried St Piran’s Church, Oratory, its cemetery (of which the skeletons of a woman cradling a child in her arms revealed themselves near the Oratory doorway in 1910), and who-knows-what-else entombed under thousands of tonnes of sand beneath and around me. I was utterly alone, nonetheless I have never felt so watched in my life. Every shadow concealed conspiratorial eyes.

Finally, redemption! A golden light bloomed from behind the rise of the dunes. Spectres slunk back into every crack in the terrain as the brightening sky banished them to the awaiting underworld. Watching as the world changed, I felt that I could remain there forever. I remember thinking at the time that I would like to return to the Cross one day at sunset, but looking back now, I don’t think an occurrence like that could possibly compare to the emotive stirrings roused by witnessing the beginning of a new dawn in the shadow of this majestic monument from our county’s hazy past.

It is said that St Piran lived to the ripe old age of 206, finally meeting his demise by falling into a well. Prior to this, after accidentally rediscovering how to smelt tin in his lonely cave, as the intense heat of his fire caused his black stone hearth to bleed silvery liquid, he became the patron saint of tin miners. Legend also states that his remains were exhumed, with parts of his body being redistributed to be venerated in several religious buildings, in various reliquaries. The reliquary containing his head is reportedly in St Piran’s Old Church, in the sand dunes of Perranzabuloe.

St Piran’s Day celebrations take place annually on March 5th. If you can’t make it to one of the numerous events that are held on this day, just grab yourself a pasty and a cloudy cyder, and promise to attend one dreckly.

And just to finish… a shot of the newer cross at Perranzabuloe (that really plays second fiddle to the original), worthy of a Hammer Horror production! I hope the afterlife is treating you kindly, Peter Cushing. You thought people looked at you as if you were some sort of monster, but you couldn’t think why. In your macabre pictures, you were either a monster-maker or a monster-destroyer, but never a monster (your words). Well, like St Piran, you’ll always be a legend to me.

Yeghes da!