Flying over in 1984 ... on a steep bank, the plane tilts so that I am looking down vertically over the Chapel field of Cape Cornwall.
St Helen’s Oratory
On the isthmus of Cape Cornwall is a wide clear field (Parc-an-capel), clear save for the remains of a Romano-Christian oratory. It could date from as early as 400 AD.
Dr Borlase says “the Promontorie of Helenus, so called as some think, because Helenus the son of Priamus,
who arrived with Brute, lieth buried there, except the sea have washed away his sepulchre.”
The oratory chapel is some 45 feet by 12 feet. “The eastern end was faced outside with hewn stone,
and had a pretty window to the altar.
The chapel yard is enclosed with a circular wall of stone,
and directly west of the chapel are to be seen
the ruins of a dwelling house which tradition says was a religious retirement.”
Pevsner refers to the building as St Catherine's Chapel.
The rough granite cross, with incised latin cross is not original, being found local to the field,
is later than the original cross, a chi-rho cross, which had also been found, but in a water course,
and had been assumed to have come from the oratory.
The chi-rho cross was later removed (it had a brass plate affixed, to identify it)
and taken to St Just Church.
For reasons unknown, a later vicar threw this and another cross down into the well at the vicarage.
One cross had been recovered in 1890,
but the well was too full of water for the other to be retieved, and is still down there.
Our Latin cross is much later, a new symbol for Christianity,
using the “Accursed tree” instead of the ealiest symbol of the fish
(relating partly to being fishers’ of men and having a parallel in Greek to the name of Christ Jesus) …
Greek (a language spoken widely in the Eastern Mediterranean of the time) Christos,
the first letters being chi-rho,
adopted by the Emperor Constantine as the symbol of his Christianity,
the earlier labarum cross.
Raymond Forward
