It is St Piran's Day in sunny Cornwall and in towns and villages across the fair duchy people are gathering to celebrate what it means to be Cornish. Here are some pictures to get you in the St Piran's spirit.

Falmouth Packet:

A depiction of St. Piran in a stained glass window in Truro Cathedral. The window was donated by a benefactor in 1907.

Saint Piran or Pyran (Cornish: Peran) was an early 6th-century Cornish abbot and saint, supposedly of Irish origin. He is the patron saint of tin-miners, and is also generally regarded as the patron saint of Cornwall.

The heathen Irish are said to have tied him to a mill-stone, rolled it over the edge of a cliff into a stormy sea, which immediately became calm, and the saint floated safely over the water to land upon the sandy beach of Perranzabuloe in Cornwall.

His first disciples are said to have been a badger, a fox and a bear.

St Piran 'rediscovered' tin-smelting (tin had been smelted in Cornwall since before the Romans' arrival, but the methods had since been lost) when his black hearthstone, which was evidently a slab of tin-bearing ore, had the tin smelt out of it and rise to the top in the form of a white cross (thus the image on the flag)