St. Piran's Shield with Cornish Heath and Choughs Ceramic Tile

“Kernow bys vyken” reads the ceramic. “Cornwall Forever”! Leave our Cornish text as is or replace it with your name, a date, or an English translation. + Here, our St. Piran’s Shield, which is based on the Cornish Flag of St. Piran (q.v.), is blazoned with a white cross on a sable black field and surrounded with sprigs of Cornish heath and red-billed choughs on a golden yellow background. + Cornwall has no official national flower, but Cornish heath (Erica vagans) is the plant most favored to claim the title. Cornish heath is a robust evergreen that blooms with pink flowers on racemes in summer and autumn. It is considered a blessed plant. According to legend, St. Joseph of Arimathea blessed the plant for providing him bedding upon his arrival in Cornwall in search of--what else?--tin! + Image credit: Sprigs of Cornish heath extracted from an antique hand-coloured botanical engraving of Erica vagans, originally published in James Sowerby's English Botany; or, Coloured Figures of British Plants, with their Essential Characters, Synonyms, and Places of Growth (London: Printed for the Author, by J. Davis, 1790-1814), loose print, from the designer's private collection. + The red-billed chough is a symbol of Cornwall and--by extension--Cornwall's patron St. Piran. Our depiction is a stylised version of the red-billed chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax), a bird of the crow family, as used in heraldry as a charge. + Our golden yellow background derives from the gold coins on the shield of the Duchy of Cornwall. Black, white, and gold constitute the Cornish colour scheme. + Image Credit (St. Piran’s Shield): Saints_Aplenty.