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"All St. Justin jewellery is crafted by hand and eye in Cornwall."

When the Angles of northern Germany invaded from the east, the native Celts fought, bled and died. The survivors fled west, where the land was rugged and it took a robust heart to survive. They carried on their lives, their traditions and their art, disturbed only by the wind and weather.

The Celtic tradition continues. Celtic design delights the eye with its intricacy, its elaborate construction, its detailed workmanship - its simplicity.

That ancient Celtic artistry lies behind each piece of St. Justin pewter jewellery, whether Celtic in form or springing from a different artistic tradition. It is an art which conceals art. A simple spiral is made into a perfect ornament by careful proportion of line and space - an indefinable feeling for the rightness of things.

Many St. Justin designs are truly ancient, going back more than 1,200 years to monasteries in remote corners of Britain. Scholarly monks worshipped God and revered the natural world around them. Through their cloisters rang the layered beauties of plain-song, and from their pens came the great illuminated Gospels. Their work exemplifies the simple sophistication of form which we know as Celtic design, and from their creations are drawn many of St. Justin's best loved pieces.

Some St. Justin designs are even older, arising from the artistry of the native people themselves - the ancient Britons, as we learned to call them at school. Their perception of the world is revealed to us in the carved stones of western and northern Britain, and the chiselled hillsides of windswept uplands. Some of the most intricate were first crafted by the warlike Vikings. Other items are medieval or Victorian. Some are modern - but they faithfully continue the traditions of the ages.

All share a vision: a delight in elegant form and a reverence for the earth and its creatures. Both are linked with a deep intuition of the continuity of things, which resonates with us today as vibrantly as it did a thousand years ago.

The result, as seen in St. Justin jewellery, is real. Not just a recreation from ages past, a copy something from once-upon-a-time, but a living art, given form in the enduring alloy of pewter. Truly, ancient art of originality.

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