Ia is said to have been an Irish missionary who came with her brothers Uny and Erth and some others to complete the conversion of the Cornish in the golden age of Celtic Christianity. For our present purpose it is not material to accept the legend, but it is useful to know that Ia is commemorated at St. Ives in Cornwall and in Finistère in Brittany, Erth at St. Erth in Cornwall and at Chittlehampton in Devon, Uny at Lelant and Redruth in Cornwall and at Plevin in Côtes du Nord. St. Dennis (or Denys), his church being situated in the centre of a hill-fort, is the only one whose name seems, at first sight, to lend colour to the new criticism. But to quote Professor Loth, writing on a totally different subject,[[80]] “it is quite impossible for Dinas by itself to be a man’s name. It is one of the most widely distributed place-names in Cornwall. Dinas in Cornish, as in Welsh, signifies a fortified town.” Assuming that a personage derived his name from the place Dinas we should have Dinan as in Cardinan. St. Dennis or Denys appears to have been the name given to a chapelry of St. Stephen (Etienne) but there is no reason to suppose that it was ancient when it first appears along with that of Caerhayes in the Inquisitio Nonarum (1340) as Capella Sci. Dionisii. St. Denys, supposed, but mistakenly, to be identical with Dionysius the Areopagite, was from the seventh century onwards venerated throughout Europe, and it is not remarkable to find him the patron of a chapel in Cornwall in the fourteenth century.
That the name of the site of the chapel may have suggested to its founder a name for its patron saint is quite possible. As late as the seventeenth century the heralds chose St. John Baptist’s head for the arms of Penzance (holy head). There are, in truth, no better grounds for regarding St. Dennis as mythical than St. Stephen to whom his chapel was appendant.
St. Allen, as the presiding saint of the hail or moor, reminds one of some rather irreverent lines by the greatest of Irish poets:
Our preacher prays he may in’erit
The hinspiration of the Spirit.
Oh! grant him also, ’oly Lord,
The haspiration of thy word.
St. Allen is found as St. Alun in the Episcopal Registers. The name occurs in the cartulary of Redon and in Coed-Alun near Carnarvon in Wales. St. Alan is among the disciples of Iltut and is the patron of Corlay (Côtes du Nord). In no instance is the name found with the aspirate, or hail without it.
Pol de Leon is a personage quite as historic as Napoleon. It must rest with the reader to say whether the church in Cornwall which bears his name got it from Gwavas Lake or from the well-known British saint, a disciple of Tutwal, who founded a Breton bishopric, who was a fellow-student of St. Sampson the patron of Golant and who is himself the patron of fifteen parishes, one of which curiously enough is in Cornouaille in Brittany.
Eglosberria remains and this, we are told, is compounded of Eglos and a Cornish place-word presumed to be Berrie. The fact that no such place is now to be found in the parish of St. Buryan does not, of course, prove that in the far remote past there may not have been one. Nor does it concern us much to know that in the parish berries of sorts are abundant, holly berries, elder berries, blackberries and gooseberries; still less to consider whether the last-named berry is indigenous or acclimatised. This is not a treatise on Botany.