St Columb Minor

The current church dates from the 15th Century.

Steps up to churchyard, St Columb Minor

The site of the Parish Church is probably a very ancient pagan site. Here, long before the St.Columba legend, came the first Celtic missionaries who exorcised evil spirits and they probably erected the first Christian Church which would have been a rough wooden building.[1] The Church was replaced more than once, until in about 1100 A.D. a Norman Church was built. Its outline has been traced from the present chancel step to about the position of the font at the West end of the Church, with North and South walls exactly where the nave arches stand today. Part of the original Norman foundations can be seen at the base of the pillars.[1]

In about the middle of the 12th century, another church was erected in place of the Norman one. This had aisles which terminated at the chancel. Nothing is known about the building of this church, except in 1283 it was referred to as a chapelry to the College of Crantock. By 1417 it had been reported that the chancel was in a ruinous state and the whole church needed rebuilding. About 1430, the Nave arcades were reconstructed.[1]

The present church consists of a chancel, nave, and north and south aisles. The arcades are of six arches each, the chancel arches being obtuse, and the nave arches are pointed. The tower arch is plain; there is a north door, a south porch (within it is the date 1669), and a priest's door. The Tower, which is the second highest in Cornwall, is 115 feet in height and was built in the 15th Century; originally it could have been seen from every point in the parish. It is battlemented and finished with pinnacles.

The church tower is the 2nd highest in Cornwall.

The church has undergone two major restorations: one in 1795 and again in 1884.[1]

Double Stiles Cross

The Village was first mentioned in 1283 when it was referred to as a chapelry to the collegiate church of Crantock, it was mentioned officially in 1284 as 'Sancta Columba Minor.'[2]

In Celtic and Anglo-Saxon times Rialton (in which the village fell under) was the head manor of the Hundred of Pydar and belonged to the monks of St Petroc at Bodmin. The monastery remained in possession after the Norman Conquest and a manor house was built here by Prior Vivian (Thomas Vivian, titular Bishop of Megara) c. 1510. The manor passed to the Duchy of Cornwall in 1538 but some of the manor house remains.[3]

St Columb Minor was a large growing village when Newquay (Towan) was just a small fishing village with a clusters of cottages and farmland. The population of St Columb Minor in 1841 was 1,681 and only 489 of the people lived in Newquay.

The western end of the church and yard is in view of the Trevelgue clifftop twin tumuli, known locally as The Barrows. It is sheltered from the strong winds of the Atlantic and looks down the Rialton Valley and across to Castle-an-Dinas on the summit of Castle Downs. Local legend has it that the Celtic missionaries, centuries before the Columba legend arose, drove away the evil spirits and replaced pagan magic by Christian worship, and erected a wooden sanctuary. The church-town lay to the west and south while the shelving ground to the north and east prevented building. Hence, as in the case of so many villages, development in the 20th century extended further from the parish church, in this case towards Porth Bean and Henver Roads, leading into Newquay.

The oldest Cottages in the village are on Church Street. Honey-suckle cottage was a farmhouse in the early 17th century and the ships timbers from Porth were used in its construction.

As of 1896 there were a Cornish cross and four cross bases in the parish: the cross is at Cross Close and is unusual in being almost circular in section. The housing estate that was constructed in the 1950s now surround the cross. The Doublestiles Cross marks the ancient path to the village. Henver Road meaning 'the old road' that the cross was nearby is the main road into Newquay for a few hundred years.[4][5]

Newquay remained in the parish of St Columb Minor until 1918, when the towns St Michaels Church was built.

In 1960, the civil parish of St Columb was subsumed by Newquay of which St Columb Minor is now a suburb. Villages in this parish were: Trencreek, Chapel, Porth, Trenance and the Churchtown.[6]

The Double stiles Cross also known as Three Stiles Cross, is a good example of the rare slab form of cross whose thick, rounded section is a rare feature of that cross type. Wayside crosses are one of several types of Christian cross erected during the medieval period, mostly from the 9th to 15th centuries AD. They were to mark unfamiliar terrain.[7] The Stone is located at the junction of Duchy Road with the main route linking Newquay with the east, the modern A392 road. The cross is only one metre from its original location where, before the urban expansion of Newquay, it was situated on the edge of a field called `Cross Close', by the junction of the main route with a parish footpath leading to the church at St Columb Minor.[7]

In the medieval period, the church at St Columb Minor was a chapelry of a collegiate church at Crantock, south west of Newquay.[7] This path was of importance at that time as the direct link between these two dependent medieval religious establishments. The line of the path north east from the cross survives in a modified form as a public footpath. A second wayside cross is also located 520m to the south west along the former line of the same path.[7] The modern parish of Newquay, within which Doublestiles Cross and its church path are situated, was only created in 1918; this medieval monument preserves the route relating to the former parish of St Columb Minor and the earlier route to the church at Crantock.[7]

• Ralph Allen, postmaster
• William Golding the novelist ( "Lord of the Flies" ) was born in the parish (which at the time included Newquay, his actual birthplace).
• James Morrison (singer) lived at Porth Newquay and attended Treviglas school

• St. Columb Road

• The St Columb Minor Parish and Church History and Calendar, blotter of 1939-40

Wikimedia Commons has media related to St Columb Minor.

• St Columb Minor website with details of the Church and Parish
• Cornwall Record Office Online Catalogue for St Columb Minor

50°25′N 5°3′W