'If you stand on the highest point in St. Ervan, just 560ft above sea level, you can survey the gentle sweep of the farming landscape against the distant backcloth of the sea'. These are the frst words of the Introduction to Moira Tangye's most readable history 'The Book of St. Ervan', 'The Story of a Rural Parish' Halsgrove 2006 ISBN 1 84114 4940.

Moira goes on to say, 'Its pocket sized 3,000 acres, broken up by shielding Cornish turf or stone hedges into irregular-shaped fields, tuck into the folds of land rising from 200 to 400ft above the sea, and are surrounded by similarly agricultural parishes'. 'The dozen farmhouses snuggling in their groups of outbuildings are discreetly withdrawn from one another.''clusters of fewer than 20 houses make up each of the two villages'.

The church long ago dedicated to St. Hermes, sits snugly into its surrounding parish which like the parishes surrounding it shows a number of signs of early occupation of Bronze Age settlers and the farms of the area still retain their early descrptive Cornish names: Trembleath - the farm of the Wolf Treglinnick - the farm at a holly grove. The hamlets of penrose and Rumford are both near streams.