St Piran is the most famous of all the Irish Saints who came to Cornwall. He is said to have discovered tin.

His chief monastery in Ireland is called Clonmacnois (Clumaineteno), and fifty monasteries are subject to it, with subject churches.

"Saint Piran and Saint Columkille together wrote a gospel, each doing half, and these were two of the number of the twelve apostles who were ordained in Ireland to preach the word of God, and all the monks of Ireland opposed them out of envy."

Legend.-A gang of heathen Irishmen had tied him to a mill-stone, rolling it over the edge of a cliff into a stormy sea, which there upon was stilled, and the saint floated calmly over the water to the sandy beach of Perranzabulo.

It is said that at his death he received Holy Communion and ordered the relics of the blessed Martin the Abbot which he had brought from Ireland to be buried with him. The saints tomb (presumably the oratory referred to in the Perranzabulo Church file) was excavated to find three ells below the surface of the ground, containing the body wrapped in bark, and the body was translated to the parish Church.

Exeter Cathedral was once the fortunate possessor of one of his arms, while according to an inventory of St Piran's Church Perranzabulo had a reliquary containing his head and a hearse in which his body was placed (for processions).

Piran was remembered in Wales in a chapel dedicated to him near Cardiff Castle where, Gerald of Wales tells us, Henry II heard Mass on Low Sunday,1172.

He is sometimes confused with the Irish Ciaran of Saighir, whose feast also falls on this day, and who is honoured in Brittany. Canon Doble describes a wayside stone shrine to him beside the road between ST Pol-de-Leon and Lesneven.

Nicholas Roscarrock, a Cornishman writing in 1580, tells us that in his life-time, Pirans reliques were wont to be carried upp and down the country upon occasion.