Saint Saint Piran

Piran or Pyran (Cornish: Peran; Latin: Piranus), died c. 480, was a 5th-century Cornish abbot and saint, possibly of Irish origin. He is the patron saint of tin-miners, and is also generally regarded as the patron saint of Cornwall, although Michael and Petroc also have some claim to this title. The consensus of scholarship has identified the "Life" of Piran as a copy of that of the Irish saint Ciarán of Saigir with the names changed. While Piran's origins are not certain, it is generally accepted that he was Irish, that he spent time in Wales and later was expelled from Ireland because of his powerful preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Having been thrown into the sea tied to a mill stone, he miraculously arrived on the shores of Cornwall where he built his tiny oratory and continued his work of evangelism, founding communities. Saint Piran's Flag, a white cross on a black background, is the county flag of Cornwall. Saint Piran's Day falls on 5 March. Piran is the most famous of all the saints said to have come to Cornwall from Ireland. G. H. Doble thought that Piran was a Welshman from Glamorgan, citing the lost chapel once dedicated to him in Cardiff. From medieval times, since Brittonic languages and Goidelic languages regularly alternate p and k sounds, he had become erroneously identified with the Irish saint Ciarán of Saigir who founded the monastery at Seir-Kieran in County Offaly. Joseph Loth has argued, on detailed philological grounds, that the names Piran and Ciarán could not possibly refer to the same person. The fourteenth-century Life of Saint Piran, probably written at Exeter Cathedral, is a complete copy of an earlier Middle Irish life of Ciarán of Saighir, with different parentage and a different ending that takes into account Piran's works in Cornwall, and especially details of his death and the movements of his Cornish shrine; thus "excising the passages which speak of his burial at Saighir" (Doble).