The right name of this parish is St. Wenep, a female saint, to whom the parish is dedicated.
THE EDITOR.
Saint Wenep is, I believe, only remembered by the dedication of this parish; but St. Dye is a personage of
more consequence. He was a native of France, and in the year 655 became Bishop of Nevres; but St. Dye happened to live at a period when the prevalent fanaticism induced persons to believe that the Author of all good was most gratified by beholding the misery of his rational creatures, accompanied by their voluntary debasements through ignorance and solitude below the level of the brute creation. With this persuasion, St. Dye resigned his bishopric, and founded a house for monks at a place called Jointures, but retired himself to an anchorite cell. He is said to have died on the 19th of June, 680.
The chapel, dedicated to St. Dye, in Gwenap, had long been in ruins; but since the eager contest has grown up between the Establishment and Dissenters for retaining or acquiring power through the media of extensive education and proselytism, and Chapels, Meeting Houses, and Schools have arisen all over England, St. Dye has seen a new and spacious building displace the ruins that remained from former times.
The Beauchamps had removed from Trewince to Pengreap; where the family became extinct in the male line about the year 1818, by the decease of Mr. Joseph Beauchamp, who had lost his only son a few years before, and the estate is now divided between the two daughters of his elder brother, Mr. John Beauchamp.
Cornmarth has been already mentioned. Mr. Whitaker says that the true name is Cornmarke, and that it means the Knight’s barrow.
On the southern declivity of Cornmarth is a large excavation, supposed by some to have been made long ago for the exhibition of games, but by others to owe its general form to the accidental running together of an old mine. It is, at all events, admirably adapted to the purpose of enabling a speaker to address an extremely large assembly; and the late Mr. John Wesley has been distinctly heard by many thousands at a time in Gwenap pit.
Scornier, which a few years since exhibited the appearance of a small village, has now become perhaps the chief place in this parish. Mr. John Williams, one of the most extensive and most successful managers and adventurous miners of the present time, built here an excellent house, and adorned it with the finest collection of Cornish minerals ever brought together. Mr. Williams, after making a large fortune, has retired at an advanced age, leaving several sons engaged in the same pursuits with equal advantage to themselves and to the public; one of whom has added a second splendid house to the village.
It is quite impossible for me to enter fully into a description of the mines, which have continued in work on the most extensive scale from the period when Mr. Leman commenced the modern system up to the present time. It is said that no district of the same extent in any part of the world ever produced so much riches.