Roche is a village in mid-Cornwall, 7 miles SW of Bodmin. It takes its name from Roche Rock, a tall outcrop of quartz-schorl (a type of tourmaline) that stands outside the village to the SE with the ruin of St Michaels's chapel perched on the top. The church of St Gomonda is at the S end of the village and consists of a tall W tower, a nave with a S aisle and S porch, chancel and N transept. The tower is 15thc., but the rest of the church was altered to a rectangular plan in 1822, then restored to its original plan by J. D. Sedding in 1890, so that only the tower is truly medieval. The church is built of granite rubble and ashlar, and contains an important 12thc. font similar to that at Bodmin.

Roche is not recorded by that name in the Domesday survey, but the Domesday settlement of Tremoddret was within the present Civil parish and Tremoddret Road still exists in the village (see Maxwell 1986). In 1066 Tremoddret was held by Godwine, and in 1086 it was held by Hamelin from the Count of Mortain. By 1259 it was held by the family of de la Roche, who took their name from the manor and it remained with that family until 1351 at the earliest (Polsue, 122-23).

The font is similar to that at Bodmin, by the same sculptors but much smaller. The so-called Bodmin group of fonts includes a core set of only four by that workshop; Bodmin itself, Roche, Maker and St Newlyn East. There are at least 14 other fonts of the suspended bowl type with obvious connections to the core set, but their decoration is more simplified or almost non-existent. It is also the case that while Bodmin font gives its name to this kind of font, it cannot be the earliest of the type and this classicizing workshop is best seen as a transitional development of an older form. Thus Sedding dates the font to c.1180, and the List Description to the late-12thc. Sedding followed by Pevsner and Beacham, and the List Description, describes the decoration of loosely knotted cords with tasseled ends on 3 faces of the bowl as interlaced snakes with twisted bodies. The present author does not accept this, not least because they would then have heads at both ends and their bodies are not only twisted but very irregular in thickness, suggestive of a soft cord.