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Churches have long stood at the heart of many communities, particularly in remote or rural areas, where they offer opportunities for social interaction as well as religious inspiration. They are also treasure-troves of centuries-old stories – and an initiative that I have been running in Cornwall since spring 2026 is demonstrating the real benefits that people can gain from immersing themselves in local heritage sites, alongside the surprising discoveries that can be made during these visits.
First, a little background: as part of my community outreach work in Cornwall, I am the Archaeology Officer for the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies (currently 42-strong and growing), and I am keen to strengthen the bonds between all these groups, growing them from within. I also run a social enterprise business, Lore & Piece, which, in part, offers free and low-cost workshops in heritage venues, and school-based sessions, all incorporating living history and crafts practice. I find great joy in storytelling and bringing history and heritage alive. But I am mindful. Having grown up on the peninsula of Cornwall, and experienced the realities of rural living, I am concerned with how community educators can connect with marginalised or more remote audiences and offer them the same opportunities.
One way to combat loneliness – which, especially since COVID, affects more people than we may realise – is by offering groups a meeting place and immersing them in the heritage around them. This idea sparked ‘Saints and Socials’, an initiative focused on exploring Cornish churches, which I piloted with Lore & Piece earlier this year. The premise was simple: encourage community collaboration, explore historic settings in engaging ways, and enthuse people about how we can raise awareness of and protect these sites for future generations. My plan was to visit a handful of churches at a time, grouped under an overarching theme – and for the inaugural topic, being an early career wall paintings conservator, wall paintings seemed an obvious choice. We could take an interdisciplinary approach, exploring the art history, iconography, and sociopolitical context of the paintings, as well as discussing hagiography and conservation methods – and, in terms of interesting examples, we were spoilt for choice.
Old depictions, new discoveries
Our first visit was one of contrasts, showcasing small and very large paintings at two sites associated with Cornish saints. About 8km (5 miles) outside Falmouth, St Constantine’s Church (in a village of the same name) is dedicated not to the Roman Emperor who famously converted to Christianity in AD 312, but to a local ruler who is thought to have lived in around the 6th century. In a side aisle, the fragmentary image of a mitre-clad figure can still be seen, offering tantalising traces of the colourful paintings that would have once covered the plastered walls. Something more imposing, meanwhile, survives around 10.5km (6.5 miles) to the south-east in the town of St Keverne. The eponymous saint – alternatively known as St Achevran, St Akeveranus, and St Kieran – also lends his name to the parish church where, in the 1830s, restoration works revealed a large image of St Christopher whose existence had been literally whitewashed by proponents of the Reformation. St Christopher was a popular subject for medieval wall paintings, with hundreds of examples documented across England and Wales. As our attendees learned, however, St Keverne’s version is rather rarer. The towering (if faded and damaged) central figure is surrounded by several smaller images from the saint’s life, a design that is otherwise known from just two other churches: Hemblington in Norfolk, and Shorwell on the Isle of Wight – and it includes an anachronistic fishing reel, testifying to later interventions.
The second outing took us to the north coast, near Bude – an area that is famous for surfing and dramatic cliffs, and is also home to fascinating churches. The initiative visited three, and, as participants varied each time, no two heritage conversations (guided by open-ended questions throughout each event) were the same. At Morwenstow, we examined a church dually dedicated to St John the Baptist and St Morwenna – the latter being another Cornish saint, who is thought to be the subject of a fragmentary late 15th-century painting surviving on the church’s north wall, depicting a woman with a scroll in one hand and the other raised to bless a kneeling monk. The church at Poughill, meanwhile, bears the name of a definitely non-local saint: King Olaf II of Norway (d. 1030), evoking Viking links. There, too, 19th-century works had revealed long-covered frescoes, both thought to have originally depicted St Christopher. Exceptionally, their ‘washing out’ is documented in surviving records from the 1550s, possibly in response to the 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion against the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer and English-language services in Cornish-speaking areas. The Poughill paintings were colourfully ‘restored’ by their Victorian finders and overpainted again in the 1950s – and at some point St Christopher became St Olaf, with the addition of a crown; scientific analysis might help to establish when this took place.
Both of the aforementioned sites sparked fruitful conversations, but the church at Launcells – dedicated to St Swithin, a 9th-century Bishop of Winchester – offered us opportunities to enrich many different heritage discussions. The building’s interior has largely escaped heavy-handed Victorian restorations (leading John Betjeman to hail it as ‘the least spoiled church in Cornwall’), and its west wall bears a now-fragmentary painting of Abraham’s averted sacrifice of Isaac, with the Old Testament figures shown wearing the hose, tunics, cloaks, and high-heeled shoes that were fashionable at the time of the image’s creation. Most excitingly, I made three new discoveries during our tour, highlighting the importance of in-person visits. I was able to identify three layers (rather than one) of painting on an area of the western wall, the latest of which was possibly unsanctioned graffiti. This prompted thought-provoking questions about when graffiti moves through the social conscience – when does it shift from a general nuisance to something historical that should be preserved under Perspex? Over on the south wall, some layers of pigment were interpreted as a cloaked figure with an arm outstretched, while a newly emerged patch on the north wall proved to contain at least five layers of plaster and two painting campaigns. The enthusiasm of everyone present was palpable, as we discovered heritage together in real time: a day well spent, socialising and soaking up knowledge.
Evocative images
The project’s third event was our most popular so far, not least because it involved a visit to Breage, whose church (dedicated to St Breaca, an early medieval female missionary; once considered to be Irish, the latest research suggests she was Cornish) is celebrated for its extensive, evocative wall paintings. The two most impressive images are found on either side of the north door, where they would have been immediately visible to anyone walking through the main entrance to the south. On the left, St Christopher carries the infant Christ across a river teeming with fish, a mermaid, and a man in a boat, while on the right stands a more dramatic figure. A now-adult Christ, crowned but otherwise wearing only a loincloth, is shown as the ‘Man of Sorrows’, displaying the wounds of his crucifixion. He is surrounded by images of diverse working tools, items symbolising gambling (including a playing card) and drinking, and musical instruments, and all of these are shown inflicting new injuries to his bloodied body. Known as a ‘Warning to the Sabbath-breakers’, such compositions presented visceral deterrents to viewers who had planned to spend their day of rest in less-than pious pursuits. Elsewhere in the church, smaller figures include St Hilary, St Corentin, St Giles, and St Thomas Becket; the Archangel Michael trampling a dragon; and a possible Henry VI resplendent in red robes and ermine (his crown had been changed to a mitre). While many of our attendees had visited this church before, everyone seemed to glean something new during the trip (which included a bonus tour of the bell tower, courtesy of the lovely churchwarden Trefor). Those wondering why so many musical instruments featured in this particular ‘Warning to the Sabbath-breakers’, for example, learned that it was a visual dig at the local gentry family, the Godolphins, for playing their music overexuberantly on a Sunday and disturbing the peace.
This was a shorter event, as an online talk about medieval ecclesiastical wall-paintings, for Cornwall Archaeological Society, was scheduled for the evening, but our fourth outing saw a return to visiting multiple sites. One of these was St Thomas’s Church in Launceston, which had originated as a chapel serving Launceston Priory (once the largest priory in Cornwall, its post-Dissolution ruins can still be seen nearby, and we explored these with the Friends of Launceston Priory during our visit). Inside the church we shared the story of St Roch, a 14th-century French nobleman who renounced his wealth and fell ill while tending to plague victims; he was reportedly saved by a dog who brought him bread and licked his wounds. He became known as the patron saint of dogs and, among other things, knee problems – which would have been handy if you had a dog and went on a lot of walks – and at St Thomas’s, a wall painting shows Roch in pilgrim’s garb, accompanied by a dog and an angel. This is not the only point of historical interest within the church, though: we also examined a small, square iron grating that is sometimes interpreted as a window that allowed people with leprosy to observe services without entering (medieval records indicate that there was a lepers’ hospital in Launceston). We ended the visit with a reading from a poem of Charles Causley, a Cornish poet buried in the churchyard.
Our final destination was Linkinhorne, whose church (dedicated to St Melor, a 10th-century Breton saint) is home to an elaborate painting of Christ surrounded by small scenes representing the Seven Works of Mercy: burying the dead, visiting prisoners, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, and giving drinks to the thirsty. During our trip we identified evidence of two campaigns of wall-painting (instead of one), prompting discussions about conservation techniques and ‘secco’ overpainting (where pigment is applied to dry plaster, as opposed to ‘fresco’ methods using fresh plaster) – and we also examined the church’s silver communion chalice dating to the Elizabethan period.
Social sites
The project’s fifth outing focused on St Winwaloe’s Church, Poundstock, where – like at Breage – there is so much to see that it warranted a stand-alone visit. The church (whose eponymous saint has been immortalised as a local prince who travelled to Brittany and founded Landévennec Abbey) boasts a particularly graphic ‘Warning to the Sabbath-breakers’ painting, as well as a now very faded and fragmentary representation of the Seven Deadly Sins. We also saw some other rare survivors, including pieces of medieval stained glass (one bearing an image of St Luke), fragments of the original medieval rood screen, and Cornwall’s best-preserved gildhouse, which stands alongside the church and dates to the 16th century. Such structures were built to accommodate the social side of church life, including celebrations and fundraising meals, but most were demolished or repurposed when Puritanism became more prominent. The Poundstock gildhouse preserves a Royal Coat of Arms that had been cleverly repurposed by the church community: originally reading ‘C R’ for Charles I, we could see how it had been transformed into a ‘G R’ for one of the later Georgian kings – an interesting edit that is seen at Launcells, too. We heard about local community excavations as well, and helped to identify some of the finds, including two medieval ridged roof-tiles.
The 2026 series ended with a visit to my hometown of St Just-in-Penwith, and to its parish church dedicated to local saint St Just (of whom little is known, although some historians believe that he may have been the Welsh hermit St Iestyn). This trip took place on St George’s Day, which was rather fitting as the church is home to a large mural of the saint, shown on foot with his sword raised to strike a dragon – its painting date possibly suggests an implicit power struggle between the English and the Cornish. One look at George’s romantically rendered face makes the extent of the image’s 19th-century restoration (really, repainting), and its Pre-Raphaelite influences, clear. There also seems to be a knight who has been ‘repurposed’ into a nun, and, while examining another version of the ‘Warning to the Sabbath-breakers’, we could point out anachronistic additions to the tools surrounding Christ, and the use of Prussian blue – a bright, synthetic pigment not created until the early 18th century – on his loincloth.
Leaving the church, we concluded our tour at the Knut Centre, where we explored the Plain-an-Gwarry, or ‘playing place’, a kind of medieval banked amphitheatre that was once common in Cornwall but now only survives in two locations (the other is near Perranporth). They were used to stage ‘Miracle’ plays like the Ordinalia, a three-part series of Bible stories, written in Middle Cornish at Glasney College (it is now housed in the Bodleian Library), which is arguably one of Cornwall’s greatest historical treasures. John, an OCS member who attended every event, said it ‘made him more aware of the rich composite history all around us’.
Complementing the fascinating historical sites described above, I urge you to see Community Archaeology as a wonderful heritage asset in its own right. Its power can be harnessed in a multitude of ways, including supporting well-being, promoting heritage protection, and sparking conversations about people from the past, present, and future. It is an ethos that I believe in wholeheartedly: knowledge is for everyone – we grow more, together. Ultimately I hope that – if your organisation, group, or business is in a position to do so – you might be inspired to organise community-orientated heritage visits in your own area. These experiences in situ can make a real difference to the social well-being of local people and communities, particularly individuals with limited mobility. They also help to take the study of archaeology beyond infographics and into imaginations – securing its place, I hope, in our collective cultural memory for generations to come.
Source: Laura Miucci, a former Finds Liaison Officer from Cornwall, works as a freelance archaeologist (finds, excavation, archives, and outreach). She is the Director of Lore & Piece Educational Workshops, and recently became Secretary of the ClfA Community Archaeology Group.
