Bronze Age Penzance

What a wonderful work of art! Is it too complex to have been made by a 'Cornish' craftsman? I suspect that Ireland was probably joined to what is the land mass of Cornwall today that long ago! Even when it ceased to be, the Irish seem to have managed to emigrate by making a crossing on millstones and three-leaved clovers!

An inscribed stone at Bleu Bridge, Gulval, bears what is believed to have been a name ascribed to an Irishman but albeit written in ropey Latin from the 6th Century AD! Something tells me there must be a bit of Irish blood in the Cornish if there was trade over so many centuries even before. Mind you, who hasn't got some Irish blood coursing through their veins! If St Piran and St Ciaran are one and the same as is commonly thought, then we must not be surprised! I went on a pilgrimage to the Oratory on Perran Sands today (well, yesterday now!), and was greatly impressed by the good work the excavators, both experts and volunteers carried out fairly recently.

I cannot recall the dates, but a great number of Irish came to Cornwall around 500AD and most 'Cornish' Saints of Penwith are Irish holy men, a great number of names mistranslated and wrong genders applied. 'Millstone' is down to a mistranslation of the small boat used, it looked like a large clinker built' coracle with mast and sail, I believe they still use them on the East Coast of Britain. Latin became used but using a kind of ogham alphabet, mixed with a form of British. From descriptions I have read of the Bleu Bridge it appears that it was a memorial stele brought to the area from another land and later used as a bridge, for no one saw it standing in the area or even knew of its existence before it was used as a bridge.
But the point about the throat piece is that the tapping dies were rather special and required skills that would have shown in any bronze work of the area, since none has been found of similar ability in Cornwall in bronze work, it is assumed that it was brought from Ireland, where they were highly skilled in the use of tapping dies in gold work.

The name is the of the boat is the Curragh. The surviving timber version is the Coble. Earliest
words are from Herodotus in c420BC., The framework was wicker. Paddles and masts were oak, the hull was wrapped in hide.
A gold 1st C model .....
http://www.haverford.edu/engl/faculty/Sherman/Irish/boat.jpg
The tale of St Brendan the navigator [4th C] tells of a curragh made of ox-hides stretched over wooden frame and coated in wool grease carrying Brendan and 14 other monks on a voyage to ‘the promised land’.
The 'legend of S Piran and the millstone' appears in Sir Arthur Quiller Couch The Delectable Duchy. He reports that he obtained the basis for this tale from a local miner. The fact that S Piran came from the same area of Ireland as the Broighter boat is a strong link.
It was said in the tale that the 'millstone' was made of cork, how that relates to reality is another story. It was really to illustrate that St Piran had a sense of humour.