GUNWALLOC CHURCH
Gunwalloe is a chapelry in the parish of Cury. It has a singular tower standing by itself against the sandhill at the back. There is a holy well on the beach, but the tide has filled it with stones. It was formerly cleared out on S. Gunwalloe's Day, but this, unfortunately, is one of the good old customs that have fallen into neglect.
About Cury a word must be said. It is dedicated to S. Corentine, a saint of Quimper, in Brittany, and this is probably a place where Athelstan placed one of the batches of Bretons who fled to him for protection in 920, but whom he could not have planted in Cornwall till 936. That Cornwall should have received refugees from Brittany was but just, for Brittany had been colonised from Devon and Cornwall to a very considerable extent. As the facts are little known, I will narrate them here.
The advance of the Saxons and the rolling back of the Britons had heaped up crowds of refugees in Wales and in Devon and Cornwall, more in fact than the country could maintain. Accordingly an outlet had to be sought.
The Armorican peninsula was thinly populated.
In consequence of the exactions of the decaying empire, and the ravages of northern pirates, the Armorican seaboard was all but uninhabited, and the centre of the peninsula was occupied by a vast untrodden forest, or by barren stone-strewn moors. Armorica, therefore, was a promising field for colonisation.
Procopius says that in the sixth century swarms of immigrants arrived from Britain, men bringing with them their wives and children. These migrations assumed large dimensions in 450, 512-14, and between 561 and 566.
So early as 461 we hear of a "Bishop of the Britons" attending the Council of Tours. In 469 the British settlers were in sufficient force at the mouth of the Loire to become valuable auxiliaries against the invading Visigoths.
The author of the Life of S. Winwalloe says:--