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Updated: May 22, 2025
It is quite likely that Constantine had done some bad things and been no better than his neighbours; but it is supposed that he was converted in his old age, through the preaching of St. Petrock, whom we shall meet more intimately at Padstow.
Petrock is in the centre of the city, and was one of the oldest and most important, being one of the nineteen churches to which William I ordered the provost to pay a silver penny yearly. The church was enlarged on the south side during the fifteenth century, and in the following century the Jesus aisle was added, when Thomas Chard, acting as Bishop Oldham's suffragan, reconsecrated the church.
Petrock was a Celtic saint, probably a Welshman, who went to Ireland for his religious education; he crossed to Cornwall in a coracle, and landed in this estuary of the Camel. He founded an oratory here, and probably another at Little Petherick.
Bodmin can boast precedence of Padstow in certain respects, for it attained episcopal consequence, besides being the county town of Cornwall; but with regard to priority in connection with Petrock, it is clear Padstow has the first claim.
Breock is supposed to have arrived in Cornwall, from Wales, earlier than Petrock. He was an old man, and, as Mr. Baring-Gould tells us, one day his companions "left him to sing psalms in his cart whilst they were engaged at a distance over some pressing business.
He was ruining the harbour by his attempts to make the ropes of sand; every rising sea scattered these ropes, however carefully formed, and the sand was accumulating in a bar of Doom. It is said that St. Petrock himself, the spiritual founder of Padstow, forged a chain of which every link was a prayer, and thus led away the unhappy ghost to Helston.
The church, which stands well above the town, has a good Early English tower, and a beautiful, finely carved catacleuse font; in the south porch the parish stocks are preserved. In the chancel, over the piscina, is an effigy sometimes mistaken for that of St. Anthony, but almost certainly the figure is St. Petrock himself, with his usual symbols, the staff and wolf, at his feet.
It will be seen that this chronicle of Tregeagle carries him back to the time of Petrock, the patron saint of Padstow, whose name is a corruption of Petrock's-stow. Little Petherick, sometimes called St. Petrock Minor, is thought to be a corruption of the same name.
Baring-Gould tells us that: "So completely did he sever himself from the world, that it was supposed by some that he had been murdered by Conan, his successor. He retired to a cell on the sands in the parish of St. Merryn, near Padstow, where there was a well, and where he could be near Petrock, through whom he had been brought to the knowledge of himself."
The local dedication seems to be to the Gorran or Goron who surrendered his cell at Bodmin to St. Petrock, perhaps because he recognised a better man. The coast around Gorran is very grand, and reaches its culmination in Dodman Point, sometimes called the Deadman, which rises to about 370 feet.
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