Perranporth
OS Grid ref:- SW756540
The resort of Perranporth boasts an excellent three mile sandy beach and is popular with surfers, it also has a range of facilities, shops, cafes restaurants, pubs and a range of accommodation along with a boating lake and golf course. There are some excellent cliff top walks in the area. The Millennium Sundial, a recent addition, stands by the beach, it tells Cornish time, which is twenty minutes ahead of GMT.
The town was a tin mining village in the 19th century. The Perranzabuloe Folk Museum housed in an attractive Victorian building, offers a collection of exhibits , i depicting life in the town from Victorian times. The parish church of St. Piran was built in 1804, St. Piran is the patron saint of tinners.
There have been three churches of that name in Perranporth, the Oratory of St. Piran was built in the seventh century, it was an important early Celtic monastery and a place of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages and was said to contain the relics of St. Piran. It became submerged by drifting sands in the 11th century and had to be abandoned. A second church of St. Piran was built on higher ground in 1150, but unfortunately suffered a similar fate, a Celtic cross on the cliffs marks its former position.
St. Piran's Round
An impressive Iron Age fortification, St. Piran's Round, outside Perranporth, was adapted in the Middle Ages as a playing place where medieval miracle plays were performed.
In 1969 and 1973 re-enactments of the Cornish medieval plays were performed there.
