I AM in my home, looking at a painting of St Michael’s Mount. My thought becomes a wish that I send off into the universe that I could be standing there writing this column. I will imagine it and see where the flow of words leads me.

You will know the granite causeway leading to St Michael’s stretches across the tidal waters, visible only at low tide, disappearing beneath the sea at high. It reminds me that journeys are never straightforward, that passage and connection are gifts we must meet at the right moment, and that home is both constant and changeable, like the tides themselves.

With St Piran’s Day approaching, I am reminded that Cornish migration was never an escape. It was a carrying.

When the mines of Cornwall began to fall silent, those who left did not loosen their grip on home; they tightened it. Men and women alike carried skills, songs, stories, and a sense of dignity shaped by hard rock, harsh weather, and centuries of community. Cornwall did not end at the shoreline—it crossed it.

Edward James was born in Camborne parish, Cornwall, in 1804. In 1830 he made the long journey across the Atlantic, not alone, but with hope for a new life among the lead mines of Wisconsin. His brother Joseph followed in 1831, bringing his wife Maria Eva. Together, these families worked the mines, tended the land, and built lives that were rooted and expansive. They carried Cornwall in their work, their music, their hearths, and in the care of one another.

This was not an isolated story. The Cornish in Mineral Point, Dodgeville, and surrounding areas built tight-knit communities of families and friends, where traditions endured and flourished. The pasty, the song, the Cornish way of life traveled with them, not as nostalgia, but as practice—a living thread tying the old world to the new.

This is why St Piran’s Flag still speaks so clearly: the white cross does not float above the darkness—it rises from it. Cornish identity has always known this truth: belonging is not fragile. It survives movement, deepens under pressure, and travels intact—not as memory alone, but as action, as care, as home carried forward.

When St Piran’s Day comes and on any day for that matter, we honour that past not only by raising the flag, but by building contemporary links between Cornwall and the wider world. In business, culture, sport, education, tourism, and charity, we become miners of a different sort—those who mine relationships, forge connections, and carry forward the same courage, resilience, and generosity that our forebears carried across oceans.

On St Piran’s Day, we remember not only a place, but a way of standing in the world: rooted enough to endure, generous enough to journey, and resilient enough to carry home wherever one is called to work, to love, or to build community.

Like the causeway at low tide, we walk together—seeing one another, sharing the moment, trusting that connection always returns us to the values of Cornwall.