St Piran’s Day falls on 5 March and is the national day of Cornwall. It is not a public holiday, though a substantial petition and repeated campaigns have asked for one, and observance has grown markedly over the last thirty years.
Piran and the millstone
Piran was, by tradition, a fifth or sixth-century Irish abbot. The legend has him thrown into the sea by pagan Irish kings with a millstone tied round his neck; the storm calmed, the millstone floated, and he drifted to the Cornish coast at what is now Perranporth, where he built an oratory in the dunes.
The remains of a very early chapel — one of the oldest Christian structures in Britain — were excavated from the sand at Perranzabuloe and are now protected.
The flag and the tin
St Piran’s Cross is a white cross on a black field, and the explanation given for it is industrial rather than religious. Piran is credited with rediscovering tin smelting when he built a fire on a black hearthstone and a stream of molten white tin ran out of it.
The flag therefore reads as white tin against black ore, and Piran is patron saint of tin miners as much as of Cornwall. That connection matters, because tin is the industry Cornwall was built on.
The flag is now everywhere in Cornwall — on cars, houses, pasty boxes, council branding and rugby shirts — and its adoption over the last forty years has been a visible marker of Cornish identity asserting itself.
What happens
- The march across the sands at Perranporth — the largest event, in which hundreds of people in black, white and gold walk out across the dunes to the site of the oratory, carrying flags and daffodils, for a service.
- Parades in Truro, Redruth, Bodmin and elsewhere, with Cornish tartan, brass bands and Cornish language.
- Cornish food — pasties, saffron cake, hevva cake.
- Music and singing — Cornish male voice choirs, and the anthem Trelawny, which is sung with enormous feeling and is really about a Cornish bishop imprisoned in the Tower.
The identity behind it
The day’s growth is not incidental. Cornwall has a genuine and increasingly assertive sense of being a nation rather than an English county:
- The Cornish were recognised as a national minority under the Council of Europe framework in 2014, alongside the Scots, Welsh and Irish.
- The Cornish language, dead as a community tongue by the eighteenth century, has been revived and is now taught, spoken by several hundred fluently and used on signage.
- Kernow bys vyken — Cornwall forever — appears on a great many car stickers.
A significant number of people in Cornwall do not describe themselves as English, and say so on census forms.
Perrantide
Historically, tin miners took the whole week around 5 March off, and the celebration was long and wet enough to generate the Cornish expression “drunk as a Perraner”. The modern version is considerably more decorous, though the pubs do well.