Although the church is not superior to others around it, the tower is on the whole more magnificent than any other in the county. The tower at Weck St. Mary, near Stratton, is said to be somewhat more lofty; and several exceed that at Probus in elegance and lightness of proportions, but this combines massiveness, altitude, and elaborate decoration; moreover, it has been built since the Reformation, and according to tradition, by the voluntary contributions of the unmarried inhabitants of the parish; but the same is said of a lofty tower at Derby; and of the windows of St. Neot’s Church, one is given by the unmarried men, and another by the single women of that parish. It is quite clear that this church was collegiate, having a dean and a certain number of prebendaries, founded in very early times before the Norman Conquest, and probably by St. Edward. The Deanery became attached with its share of the endowments to the Church of Exeter, but in a way which Mr. Whitaker himself has not succeeded in clearly making out. The prebendaries or some of them remained till the general dissolution, when the prebends were given or sold, and have passed through the Williams’s, by purchase to the Hawkins family, with some fairs. One fair, however, is the grant of King Charles the Second. Few gentlemen’s houses in the west of Cornwall were without the honour of receiving Prince Charles during his residence in Cornwall, about the middle part of the civil wars; and he is said to have remained for a time longer than usual with Mr. Williams, who, after the Restoration, waited on the King with congratulations from the parish; and on being complimented by him with the question whether he could do any thing for his friends, answered that the parish would esteem themselves highly honoured and distinguished by the grant of a fair, which was accordingly done for the 17th of September; this fair coming the last in succession after three others, has acquired for itself a curious appellation derived from the two patron saints, and from the peculiar pronunciation in that neighbourhood of the word last, somewhat like _laest_:―― Saint Probus and Grace, Not the first but the last, ――and from this distinction it is usually called Probus and Grace fair. It is utterly impossible now to give any account of these two personages, except that they were in all probability missionaries from Ireland. Nor is the Roman name of Probus any objection against this supposition, since such names were frequently assumed. The apostle of Ireland has a Roman name, and many of the religious must have been foreigners. On repairing the east wall of the chancel some few years since, two skeletons were found in different niches, and one of these was declared by anatomists to have been a female. These were supposed to be the relics of St. Probus and of St. Grace, which may have been true, although the present church cannot be less than eight hundred or a thousand years later than their time.