THE LAND'S END DISTRICT--ST. BURYAN--SENNEN--LAND'S END--THE LONGSHIPS
LIGHTHOUSE.
Most strangers obtain their first sight of Land's End at the conclusion
of a direct walk or drive from Penzance. It is generally the first
place the stranger desires to see, and he makes directly for it along
the high road that runs inland.
The Land's End district, stretching westward from Penzance, forms
the hundred of Penwith, a Celtic word meaning the "great, or chief,
headland"; and Land's End itself was formerly "Penwithstart," a curious
word produced by the association of the Celtic "Penwith," which had in
very early times come to mean the district in general, with the purely
Saxon "steort," or "start," a word which indicates a projecting point:
an object that in fact juts, or starts, out. Hence, for example, the
name of the Start, that prominent headland in South Devon, one of the
most salient promontories along our coasts.
The aspect of the country, as you proceed from Penzance into the Land's
End district, is quite in keeping with the name. Everything appears
to resign itself to an ending. The town of Penzance looks like a last
great urban effort, and the railway itself seems to come, tired out,
to the shores of Mount's Bay, and to expire, rather than come to a
terminus. It cannot make an effort even to get up into the town, but
stops on the doorstep, so to say. And the large white granite station,
with iron and glass roof, more resembles an aviary than a railway
terminus, the sparrows assembling there in multitudes on the tie-rods,
and chattering in almost deafening fashion. In those very considerable
intervals between the coming and going of trains one may stand on the
platform and not be able to hold a conversation, owing to the sparrows.
[Illustration: EARLY HOME OF LORD EXMOUTH.]
The western suburb of Alverton, with its beautiful gardens, and the
birthplace, or early home, of Edward Pellew, afterwards Viscount
Exmouth, left behind, and the elm-avenues of Trereife and the stream
at Buryas Bridge once passed, on the main road to Buryan and Land's
End, you come to an elevated tract of country where trees are few.
Cultivation gradually grows the exception, instead of the rule, and
there is a look as though Nature herself had grown weary and presently
could do no more.
Three miles out from Penzance the road forks. You may go equally well
either to right or left. Let us take the left-hand road, through the
half-way village of St. Buryan, which itself adds no hospitable note
to the scene, but seems to stand on the windy upland as an example
of how ashen-hued and weatherbeaten a village may be. The tall, dark
church-tower rising from its midst and serving as a landmark for
miles, is the most striking feature of the place. St. Buriana, the
patron saint, was originally Bruinech, daughter of an Irish chieftain,
who adopted the religious life. The existing church, successor of a
collegiate establishment founded by Athelstan, the Saxon conqueror
of Cornwall, in A.D. 936, stands on the site of her oratory. It was
last rebuilt in the Late Perpendicular style prevailing so largely in
Cornwall, and is a fine large building. Two ancient granite crosses on
steps stand outside; one in the churchyard, the other in the village
street.
From St. Buryan the road descends presently to the valley of Penberth
a wooded interlude, and thence rises to other bare and bleak heights,
passing at one mile from Land's End the turning that leads to Sennen,
on the alternative road.
Sennen takes its name from Senan, one of the numerous Irish missionary
saints. He returned to Ireland, and died there. It was perhaps
the friendship he cultivated with the Welsh St. David that led to
Llansannan church in Denbighshire being dedicated to him.
Sennen is the very negation of life. Conceive a village that is no
village, but only a small, grey, solemn church, a plainly built inn
with creaking sign, swaying in the wind, a few whitewashed granite
cottages, and a gaunt granite chapel. Through the place runs the road
to the Land's End, and all around are fields enclosed within stone
hedges. Never a tree in sight. That is Sennen. If you be a painter,
you will not need to set your palette with many or brilliant colours
to represent it as it is. It does not seem attractive; but in spite of
all this gaunt, weatherbeaten character Sennen is not unlovely. The
pearly, often opalescent, qualities of the Cornish skies are capable
of transcending even four-square grey granite houses with slate roofs,
and ugly chapels of the like, and of glorifying even stone hedges and
unfertile fields; and so long as Sennen remains true to itself and
innocent of red brick and ornament, which would be alien here, and
therefore vulgar, even its weatherbeaten self is not without charm.
But if Sennen be indeed in the restricted key of grey and white, there
is plentiful colour on the moorland around it, where the gorse spreads
like lavishly flung gold, mingled with abundant purple heather. Not
the scent of the sea, but the honey-like fragrance of those blossoms,
pervades the place. The sea, indeed, although only a mile distant,
whether at Land's End or at Sennen Cove, is not in view, nor is there
any hint of it. Only the treeless land, the sudden gusts of wind that
come booming along in a clear sky, and the sign of the inn give any
idea of its neighbourhood. The sign reads, as you go west, "The Last
House in England," and as you return it is "The First." But effluxion
of time and the insistence of enterprise have qualified these legends,
and there are two others, at Land's End itself: "The Land's End Hotel,"
and a little shanty where refreshments are to be had.
And from the turning to Sennen one comes thus along an unromantic final
stretch of road to Land's End.
The name, "Land's End," has an eloquent appeal understood, or if not
really and truly understood, certainly felt, by all. When one first
heard of Land's End, it was in those early years, when it indicated an
actual ending, in which the lesson presently to be learnt--that the
earth is round--had no part. The image then figured in the mind was
that of a place truly ultimate, unqualified by the statement that it
is so many thousands of miles across the seas to America, where the
land commences again. To know that it _does_ commence again is perhaps
disappointing: just as a sequel to a story is an ill thing alike for
the dramatic ending of that story and for the sequel itself.
And now we all know that, as the world is round, there cannot be any
land's end, anywhere, here or at Finisterre, or in any other country;
and that in the quest of it we should be like so many futile Wandering
Jews. One almost envies those heretics--that small but constant
band--who persist in their faith that the earth is flat; for that view
surely connotes a Land's End, somewhere. Meanwhile, we must put up with
the chastened feeling of romance with which a journey to the Land's End
of Cornwall is first undertaken.
[Illustration:
[_After J. M. W. Turner._
LAND'S END.]
I cannot, at any rate, find fault with the circumstances of my own
first journey to this spot, from London, many years ago. It was before
photographic and other illustrations had multiplied so vastly, a time
before even the untravelled were very well acquainted with the general
appearance of the most distant and obscure places; and one could still
cherish some feeling of curiosity. In those days the Great Western
Railway, while issuing excursion tickets to Penzance and elsewhere, did
so as though it were a weakness, of which it were well to say as little
as possible. The hoardings did not in those times flame with pictures
of places which were apparently created for the benefit of enterprising
railway companies.
I made that excursion journey alone from Paddington to Penzance; and
when the long day was drawing to its close and the train, having left
Truro, and most of the other passengers, behind, began to wind through
the mining-fields of Chacewater and Scorrier, where the deserted
mines and their ruined chimney-stacks and 'count-houses looked in the
gathering twilight like so many weird beasts of the world's youth,
then, as I gazed pale-faced, from a corner of the unlighted carriage,
I felt I was indeed coming to the Land's End. Perhaps, also a little
sorry for having come. But that was the dramatic, and therefore the
right, way. Penzance formed a cheerful interlude for the night, and
then on the morrow came the ten miles' walk to Land's End itself.
One has plenty of company here. Brake-loads of people, cyclists,
motor-cars, all day long: contemplative people, reverent people,
disappointed and irreverent people, a little contemptuous. You can
see the thought, "Is this all?" visibly expressed upon their faces. I
don't know what they expected: perhaps something in the nature of that
childish vision of an abysmal ending, with a horned and hoofed personal
devil over the edge; or, at the very least, whales spouting and sharks
swimming. And really the cliffs are but some sixty feet high, and it
is not a difficult matter to scramble down to the shore, such a tiny
exigent bit of shore as there is, at low-water.
The very worst thing to do, to get an adequate idea of Land's End, is
to stand upon Land's End itself. It is not impressive, and you want
that which you will hardly get here, except on a winter's day or late
in the evening: solitude. It is, in fact, not so much the comparative
tameness of the spot as the too much company that is really at the
bottom of the not very reasoned dissatisfaction most people feel here;
and the guides who wish to point out "Dr. Johnson's Head," the "Armed
Knight," and other rock-resemblances, are a nuisance. No: go rather
a little to the north of Land's End, and then look back upon it, and
thence you will see the little crowds of people clustered about it,
giving a much-needed idea of scale; and the natural arch beneath it
then is visible, and Enys Dodnan and other rocky islets come properly
into perspective, with the Longships lighthouse yonder; and, if it
be sunset, you may see the round red face of the sun setting on the
distant horizon, with some scattered black specks in front. Those are
the Isles of Scilly, twenty-seven miles away. The sea in between is
"Lethosow," traditionally the site of that lost land of Lyonesse which,
with its one hundred and forty churches, was suddenly overwhelmed by
the sea in a great storm, vaguely about a thousand years ago. Carew
indeed gravely tells us that fishermen at the Seven Stones (a lonely
reef thirteen miles north of St. Mary's Island, marked by a lightship)
have drawn up with their nets pieces of doors and windows! The
Fishermen even to this day call the spot "The City."
The Longships lighthouse is about a mile and a half out at sea, but
such is the deceptive purity of the atmosphere that, to a Londoner,
it looks less than half that distance. Carn Brâs, the reef on which
it stands, rises forty-five feet above the sea at low water, and all
around it are numerous rocks, marked on Ordnance maps "Kettles Bottom."
The original lighthouse, built in 1793, was a very stumpy affair,
and was rebuilt in 1872. It has a singularly tragic record. Four of
the lighthouse men have at different times been washed off the rock
and drowned, the last in 1877; another died in the lighthouse, one
went raving mad, and another committed suicide. He lacerated himself
severely and his two mates staunched his wounds by stuffing them with
tow. They hoisted signals for assistance, but stormy weather severed
all communication for some days, and he was at last landed only to
die. It is a melancholy history, and that and the weird noises made by
the sea in caverns under the reef make the Longships one of the least
desirable of berths at the disposal of the Trinity House.
Here in November 1898 the steamship _Bluejacket_ ran at full speed upon
the rocks.
The Wolf lighthouse, eight miles from shore, is a picture of utter
loneliness. It was built between 1862 and 1869 on the reef of that
name, awash with the tide at high-water, and cost £62,726.