St Piran's Round

St Piran’s Oratory stands in the Penhale Sands, a dune system two and a half kilometres north of the B3285 between Goonhavern and Perranporth. The hamlets of Rose and Lower Rose lie to its north-east, and the land around is farmland. The buried remains of a sixth-century oratory and a later church lie beneath the dunes, both abandoned when the sand moved in. The round itself is a circular earthwork about forty-five metres wide, with a rampart nearly three metres high and a ditch outside. A causeway three metres wide forms the southern entrance, while the northern side is open to the dunes. It began as an Iron Age enclosure and later became a playing-place for medieval miracle plays. The Ordinalia, three late-fourteenth-century Cornish plays, were performed here, and a small trench called the Devil’s Spoon was dug for the staging. Richard Carew wrote in 1602 that Gwary miracles, plays drawn from scripture, were held here. In the 1850s Methodists enclosed the east side as a neat amphitheatre for tea-meetings, and before the First World War political parties held rallies on the site. Visitors today find a grassy circle ringed by a low earth bank and a shallow ditch. The flat top of the bank is wide enough to walk along, and the southern entrance is paved. The dunes stretch away to the north, and the buried walls of the old oratory lie beneath the sand. The round is quiet, with no modern buildings inside, and the only marks are the old trench and the wide entrance causeway.