_Cliff scenery and headlands--The Land's End sentiment--Pilgrims and
how they are affected--Wilkie Collins--The child's vision--Books on
Cornwall--A Trip to the Far West--Sir Humphry Davy--Wesley--Winter
nights at the Land's End--Lighthouses--Associations and
speculations--The scene of great tragedies in the past._
|EVERY day, even in winter, if the weather be not too bad, but chiefly
during the nine months from March to November, pilgrims come to this
wind-swept, wave-beaten point to gaze and set their feet upon the little
rocky promontory of the Land's End. It is less bold and impressive
than many others of the hundred headlands at this western extremity of
England between St. Ives and Mount's Bay. From this or that projecting
point, commanding a view of the coastline for some distance, one
may count a dozen or more of these headlands thrust out aslant like
stupendous half-ruined buttresses supporting the granite walls of the
cliff. They are of a sullen brown colour and rough harsh aspect, and in
places have the appearance of being built up of huge square blocks
of granite, and at other points they form stacks of columns as at
the Giant's Causeway. The summits of these headlands are often high,
resembling ruinous castles placed on projecting points of the cliff;
they are confused masses of rocks of many shapes, piled loosely one upon
the other, their exposed surfaces clothed over with long coarse grey
lichen. Large gulls, daws and cormorants sit or stand here and there
on the ledges and prominent points, the herring gulls clamorous at the
sight of a human form; the restive daws quitting their stands to wheel
about at intervals, rising and falling, soon to settle down again; the
cormorants silent and motionless, standing erect with curved, snaky
necks, like birds carved in ebony.
Stealing quietly among these hoary masses of rock you may see a very
wild rabbit, and on a bright, still, winter day, if you are singularly
fortunate, you may catch sight of a beast better worth seeing, a cliff
fox, lying fast asleep or lightly dozing, stretched at full length on
a ledge, looking intensely red in the sunshine, and very conspicuous
against the hoary lichened rock. This is his home and castle, which
he shares with the rabbits that know his ways, and the birds that are
always just out of his reach. Thus do they live together in one house
like one antagonistic family in a strange artificial harmony, and do
not mix, but come and go and move about freely, and bask in the warm
sunshine, and sit up to rub their long ears and whiskers, and spread out
their wings to dry, and preen their feathers. Peace and quiet in their
castle, while the great waves roll in to beat on its caverned walls
beneath, making the earth tremble with their measured blows, covering
the black rocks with dazzling white foam, and sending up a mist of spray
to the summit.
At intervals between Bay and Bay, a distance of thirty miles, you come
upon headlands of this type--Cape Cornwall, Gurnard's Head, Zennor
Cliffs and others, to the north of Land's End, while just south of
it you have the noblest rock scenery of this coast, including the
stupendous cliffs of Tol-Pedn-Penwith and Treryn Dinas, with its famed
Logan Stone. Bolerium itself, the narrow promontory of piled rocks of
the Land's End and the flat bit of country adjoining it is, sentiment
apart, one of the least interesting points on the coast.
But the sentiment is a very great thing and interesting to observe. And
this is easy, since the pilgrims mostly come by way of Penzance, distant
about a dozen miles, travelling in batches of twenty-five or thirty or
more, packed closely in some public conveyance; so that one has but to
join the crowd and, sitting among them, watch their faces out of the
corners of his eyes. They are a mixed company of men and women of all
conditions, from all parts of the country, with some Americans and
Colonials. It is indeed curious to see an identical feeling on faces so
unlike, from the very young who do not try to conceal it, to the very
aged and almost worn-out globe wanderers, who are now nearly at the end
of their life's pilgrimage, and have seen pretty well all that was worth
seeing on this wide earth except this one famous spot which by chance
has been left to the last.
[Illustration: 0071]
And by and by, after travelling half a dozen miles, they find themselves
in a land unlike any place they know; inhabited, for there are a few
small sad-looking granite cottages and farms and hamlets, but of a rude
and desolate aspect, and therefore in harmony with their emotions and
preconceived ideas about the place. It is a treeless barren country,
hill and moor, with furze and brown heath interspersed with grey boulder
stones, the whole dominated by the great desolate hill of Chapel Carn
Brea. The travellers look out, straining their eyes to see the end; but
before that comes the hilly country is left behind, and at the last it
is flat and tame with a sad-looking granite-built village and the grey
sea beyond. One has watched the bright eager look that expected so much
fade out of the various faces; and by the time the pilgrims get down to
scatter along the cliff or to go at once to their luncheon at the hotel
it is pretty well all gone. And if you go back to Penzance to join the
next lot, and then again, and every day for a week or a month, you will
witness the same thing--the collection of unlike faces with the light
of the same feeling in the eyes of all, increasing as they advance
over that rude moorland country and fading out at the end to that blank
look--"Is this the Land's End--is this all!"
What, then, did they expect? Wilkie Collins best answers that question
in his pleasant book of rambles written more than half a century ago,
when he says that the Land's End is to Cornwall what Jerusalem is to the
Holy Land, the great and final object of a journey to the westernmost
county of England, its Ultima Thule, where it ceases; a name that
strikes us most in childhood when we learnt our geography; which fills
the minds of imaginative people with visions of barrenness and solitude
and dreams of some lonely promontory, the place where the last man in
England will be found waiting for death at the end of the world.
That is indeed the secret of the visitor's expectant feeling and
disappointment--the vague vision of a vastness and grandeur and
desolateness almost preternatural, conceived in childhood, which all
the experience of a long life of disillusionment has been powerless to
eradicate from the mind, or to replace with a mental picture more in
accord with the reality.
But if this disillusionment is plainly visible to an observer on the
faces of many visitors, the books about Cornwall tell a different story;
their writers would have us believe that the reality has surpassed their
expectations, that their emotions of admiration and astonishment have
been deeply moved. When I had been some time in Cornwall and it had
taken hold of me, I sat myself down before a formidable array of
books descriptive of the duchy, only to find that reading them was
an exceedingly wearisome task. By and by I discovered something to
entertain and keep me going; this was the grand business of describing
the Land's End in a suitable manner, but more or less rhetorically and
charged with exalted feeling, which was undertaken in turn by every
visitor. This made many a dull book amusing. I experienced a kind of
sporting interest in the literary traveller's progress through the
county, and looked eagerly forward to his arrival at the famous
spot where he would have to pull himself together and launch himself
bird-like from the cliffs, as it were, on the void sublime. There was
great variety in these utterances, but I think the one that diverted me
most was in a book entitled _A Trip to the Far West_, published in 1840,
as the author, one Baker Peter Smith, was evidently an experimenter in
words, some of his own making; or we might call him an Early Victorian
young man in search of a style.
"I reached the Land's End," he wrote, "and sat down on a protuberant
block of granite, close to the precipice, overhanging the multitangular
rocks which form an impenetrable barrier against the raging tides of the
mighty waters." After lamenting that he had so little time in which to
survey the "multicapsular curiosities of the region," he proceeds: "The
local sublimity of the Land's End affords a commanding view of scenick
expanse; and the colossal columns of rock give an awful effect to
the stupendous vision; whilst, added to these grave and elevating
sentiments, consequent on so grand a sight, the sense of hearing also
acts upon the mind: by the distant roar of the angry sea, ascending from
the caverns below, and the screaming of the Cornish chough assailing
you from above and every side," and so on. He concludes:--"The entranced
spectator has no election, but is engrossed with admiration of that
Great Power by the fiat of whose mere volition nature's chaos was thus
harmonized and stamped with the glorifying impress of multiplicious
beauty."
One is glad that cormorant, book-devouring Time, has spared us Baker
Peter Smith.
But there are a few noble passages to be found as well, and I think
this one of Humphry Davy, written in youth before the flower of poesy
withered in him, pleases me the best:
On the sea
The sunbeams tremble and the purple light
Illumes the dark Bolerium, seat of storms!
Dear are his granite wilds, his schistine rocks
Encircled by the waves, where to the gale
The haggard cormorant shrieks, and, far beyond
Where the great ocean mingles with the sky,
Behold the cloud-like islands, grey in mist.
Another notable utterance was that of John Wesley, when on a Sunday in
September, 1743, after preaching to the people at Sennen, he went down
to look at the Land's End. "It was an awful sight," he wrote. "But how
will this melt away when God ariseth in judgment! The sea beneath doth
indeed boil like a pot. One would think the deep to be hoary. But though
they swell yet can they not prevail. He shall set their bounds which
they cannot pass."
There spoke the founder of Methodism, saturated in Biblical phraseology
until it gushed spontaneously from him even as its song or cry from
a bird. He had forgotten his own language, as it were, and even in an
exalted moment in this grey north land could only express himself in
these old Asiatic figures of speech.
To return from this digression. Although the vague image of an imagined
Land's End fades from the mind and is perhaps lost when the reality is
known, the ancient associations of the place remain, and, if a visit be
rightly timed, they may invest it with a sublimity and fascination not
its own. I loitered many days near that spot in midwinter, in the worst
possible weather, but even when pining for a change to blue skies and
genial sunshine I blessed the daily furious winds which served to keep
the pilgrims away, and to half blot out the vulgar modern buildings with
rain and mist from the Atlantic. At dark I would fight my way against
the wind to the cliff, and down by the sloping narrow neck of land
to the masses of loosely piled rocks at its extremity. It was a very
solitary place at that hour, where one feared not to be intruded on by
any other night-wanderer in human shape. The raving of the wind among
the rocks; the dark ocean--exceedingly dark except when the flying
clouds were broken and the stars shining in the clear spaces touched the
big black incoming waves with a steely grey light; the jagged isolated
rocks, on which so many ships have been shattered, rising in awful
blackness from the spectral foam that appeared and vanished and appeared
again; the multitudinous hoarse sounds of the sea, with throbbing and
hollow booming noises in the caverns beneath--all together served to
bring back something of the old vanished picture or vision of Bolerium
as we first imagine it.
[Illustration: 0071]
The glare from the various lighthouses visible at this point only
served to heighten the inexpressibly sombre effect, since shining from
a distance they made the gloomy world appear vaster. Down in the south,
twenty-five miles away, the low clouds were lit up at short intervals
by wide white flashes as of sheet lightning from the Lizard lights, the
most powerful of all lights, the reflection of which may be seen at a
distance of sixty or seventy miles at sea. In front of the Land's End
promontory, within five miles of it, was the angry red glare from the
Longships tower, and further away to the left the white revolving light
of the Wolf lighthouse.
It was perhaps on some tempestuous winter night at the Land's End that
the fancy, told as a legend or superstitious belief in J. H. Pearce's
_Cornish Drolls_, occurred to him or to some one, that the Wolf Rock was
the habitation of a great black dog, a terrible supernatural beast that
preys on the souls of the dead. For the rock lies directly in the route
of those who die on the mainland and journey over the sea to their
ultimate abode, the Scilly Isles: and when the wind blows hard against
them and they are beaten down like migrating birds and fly close to the
surface, he is able as they come over the rock to capture and devour
them.
During these vigils, when I was in a sense the "last man" in that most
solitary place, its associations, historical and mythical, exercised a
strange power over me. Here, because of its isolation, or remoteness,
from Saxon England, because it is the very end of the land, "the
westeste point of the land of Cornewalle," the ancient wild Spirit
of the people remained longest unchanged, and retained much of its
distinctive character down to within recent times. It was a Celtic
people with an Iberian strain, even as in Wales and Ireland and
Scotland. Now, either because of a different proportion of the dark
aboriginal blood, or of the infusion of Scandinavian and other racial
elements, or some other cause, these four Celtic families differ very
widely, as we know; but we think, or at all events are accustomed
to say, that they are an imaginative, a poetic people. Doubtless in
Cornwall this spirit was always weakest, since it never succeeded in
expressing itself in any permanent form; but albeit feeble it probably
did exist, and in this very district, this end of all the land, it must
have lingered longest. If this be so it is strange to think that it was
perhaps finally extinguished by the Wesley brothers--one with the poetry
of the Hebrews ever on his lips, the other with his own lyrical gift!
It may be said that in the middle of the eighteenth century the light
must have been so feeble that it would have soon expired of itself if
Methodism had not trampled out the last faint sparks; and it may also
be said that the Cornish people did not lose much, seeing that this root
had never flowered; that they had never sung and never said anything
worth remembering; while on the other hand their gain was a substantial
one, for though it imposed an ugly form of religion and ugly houses of
worship, it changed them (so the Methodists say) from brutality and
vice to what they are--a temperate, law-abiding people. But I shall have
something more to say on this subject in a later chapter.
Here among the rocks by night I think less of these moral changes,
and of other events within historical times, than of those which came
before, of which we have no certain knowledge. We can only assume that
in the successive invasions during the Bronze Age this was invariably
the last place conquered and last refuge of a beaten fugitive people.
I recall here a strange phenomenon in wild-bird life occasionally
witnessed in this district. Cornwall has a singularly mild and equable
climate, but great frosts do at long intervals invade it and reach to
the very extremity of the land: and when a cold wave, like that of the
winter of 1906-7, travels west, the birds flying for life before it
advance along the Cornish country until they come to a point beyond
which they cannot go, for the affrighting ocean is before them and they
are spent with hunger and cold. They come in a continuous stream, to
congregate in tens of thousands, covering the cliffs and fields and
stone hedges; and the villagers turn out with guns and nets and sticks
and stones to get their fill of killing.
So in the dreadful past, whenever a wave of Celtic conquest swept west,
the unhappy people were driven further and further from the Tamar along
that tongue of land, their last refuge, but where there were no rivers
and mountains to stay the pursuers, nor forests and marshes in which to
hide, until they could go no further, for the salt sea was in front of
them. They too, like the frost-afflicted birds, gathered in thousands
and sat crowded in every headland and promontory and every stony hill
summit, ever turning their worn dusty faces and glazed eyes to the east
to watch for the coming of the foe--the strong, fiendish, broadfaced,
blue-eyed men with metal weapons in their hands, spear and sword and
battle-axe.
These are the people I think about on dark tempestuous evenings in this
solitary place; Bolerium is haunted by the vast ghostly multitude.
[Illustration: 0083]