Helland is situated around three-quarters of a mile South of Mabe in Cornwall.

Standing on the wall at the edge of the garden of Helland House and overlooking the minor Brill to Lamanva road, a little granite wheel-headed wayside cross is found.

Helland Cross

The settlement at Helland was first recorded during 1323 as ‘Hellan’ although it was certainly a place of human occupation for countless years before that.

Helland is a Cornish place name derived from the Cornish language ‘hen’ and ‘lann’ so translates into English as ‘old cemetery’ or ‘old religious enclosure’.

Lanns are common in Cornwall and indeed Wales and date from the early Christian period between the 5th and 7th centuries. These were settlements which comprised an enclosure surrounding a consecrated area. Domestic habitations, a chapel and indeed a cemetery were often found in lanns and a large number of churches were later constructed on such sites.

Again, an examination of toponymy reveals much for a lann did indeed exist at Helland and the site is marked as a graveyard on the 1908 Ordnance Survey map.

Ordnance Survey 1888, reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The great antiquarian, Arthur G. Langdon writing in his ‘Old Cornish Crosses’ published in 1896, informed of the garden at Helland House as once being the site of an ancient chapel and graveyard. It appears that he had a discussion with a local farmer, a William Rail, who related carrying out work in the garden and uncovering the cross, an old font bowl and a quantity of old roofing slates which he suspected belonged to the lost buildings. It was Mr. Rail who erected the cross on its present site

The Helland Cross as sketched by Arthur Langdon 1896

Writing of the site in 1925 and again in 1930, the Cornish historian and antiquarian Charles Henderson (b.1900  d.1933) recorded the existence of an Early Mediaeval (410 to 1065) chapel and burials of a so-called ‘primitive’ nature with a rather charming local tradition of children visiting the chapel each Spring time, bringing flowers.

The cross as seen now stands at around three feet eight inches in height with the head measuring around one foot ten inches in diameter. The cross shaft tapers out slightly from 13 inches at its neck to 16 inches at its base. The monument is between nine and ten inches in thickness.

In terms of decoration, there is an incised Saint Andrew’s cross enclosed by a double bead on the outward face and this bead extends down the shaft where a rectangle has been carved with diagonal lines running from corner to corner. Just below the head and on the upper part of the neck bosses have been carved. The reverse side has been carved with an incised equal limbed cross with shallow holes at the ends enclosed by an incised ring which extends down the shaft.

Charles Henderson proposed that the cross was pre-Norman in date but in ‘Ancient and High Crosses of Cornwall’, the authors Ann Preston-Jones, Andrew Langdon and Elisabeth Okasha suggest it dates from post-Norman Conquest date probably of the 12th or 13th centuries.

Both the cross and the wall upon which it stands are now Scheduled Monuments.

References

All images author’s own, except where stated.

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