A book of the west. Volume 2, Cornwall : $b being an introduction to Devon and CornwallBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A book of the west. Volume 2, Cornwall : $b being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Cornwall (England : County)
The Land’s End is properly Penwith, either Pen-gwaed, the Bloody
Headland, or Pen-gwaedd, the Headland of Shouting. Probably it is the
former, for it was the last place of refuge of the Ibernian population,
and in the first years of the sixth century, even perhaps earlier, it
was occupied by Irish settlers, and that there was fighting is clearly
shown us in the legend of SS. Fingar and Piala. It must have been to
the original people of the peninsula what Mona was to the Welsh.
All we _know_ about this invasion is what is told us in the legend just
mentioned, and that states that Fingar, son of an Irish king, came to
Hayle, landed there with his party, and was fallen upon by Tewdrig, the
Cornish duke or king, who massacred some of the party. But the names of
the parishes tell us more than that. They show us that the Irish were
not defeated, that they made good their landing, and that they spread
and occupied the whole of Penwith and Carnmarth, that is to say, the
entire district of West Cornwall up to Camborne and the Lizard district.
The colonists cannot have been few, and they must have purposed
settling, for they brought women along with them; and that they were
successful is assured by the fact that those killed by Tewdrig are
recognised as martyrs. Had the Irish been driven away they would have
been regarded as pirates who had met their deserts.
Now this inroad of saints was but one out of a succession of
incursions, and the resistance of Tewdrig marks the revolt against
Irish domination which took place after the death of Dathi in 428, the
last Irish monarch who was able to exact tribute from Britain; though
Oiliol Molt may have attempted it, he was too much hampered by internal
wars to make Irish authority felt in Britain. Oiliol fell in 483.
The Irish saints came across in detachments. Senan, Erc (Erth), Setna
(Sithney), Brig (Breage), Just were some of the earliest. There was
trouble when Brig arrived, and she and her party fled from Tewdrig
and fortified themselves on Tregonning Hill, where their camp still
remains. But Kieran and his pupils, Medran (Madron) and Bruinech
(Buriena), were unmolested; so also was S. Ruan.
One thing they could not do, and that was impress on the people the
Scottish or Irish pronunciation. They were few among many, and they
not only could not make the natives pronounce a hard _c_, but they
were themselves obliged to suffer their own names to be softened, and
the _c_ in them to be turned into _p_, and the _f_ into _gw_. Thus
Kieran became Piran, and Fingar became Gwinear. The Irish _c_ is always
sounded like _k_, and the Cornish disliked this sound. When S. Kiera
settled in Cornwall she had to accustom herself to be called Piala; and
Eoghain was melted down into Euny, and Erc softened into Erth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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