CORNWALL was made collegiate in the time of the Confessor, with a dean and canons, being enriched with the offerings of many pilgrims who were drawn hither by the fame of St. Piran. Henry L presented this establishment to the canons of Exeter. In 1420 the church was rebuilt; but Borlase, writing in the eighteenth century, at a time when the first oratory was entirely lost, said : "The second church is in no small dan- ger". In 1 803 this danger became so imminent that the people of Perranzabuloe resolved to move their church-town once more. The re- sult was the present church, in which a tablet records the fact that " the first stone was laid in the year 1804, after two former churches had been successively overwhelmed with the sand of the desert in which they were im- prudently built". Traces of the second church may be seen yet, marked by a cross ; but the materials were for the most part removed and reproduced in the existing building, in which also is an ancient hexagonal font, supposed to have been removed from the buried oratory. In 1835 a shifting of sand, about a third of a mile to the W. of the second church, revealed this oratory itself after a burial of eight or nine centuries. Though the discovery made a considerable stir, and was proclaimed to the public in books written by the Revs. W. Haslam and Trelawny-Collins, the ruin was treated with neglect, except one most ill-advised at- tempt at restoration by Mr. Haslam. For many years the remains were left to the com- 214
