The Cornish Coast (South), and the Isles of Scilly

by Charles G. Harper

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.