Something like what Jerusalem was to the pilgrim in the Holy Land, the Land’s End is — comparing great things with small — to the tourist in Cornwall. It is the Ultima Thule where his progress stops — the shrine¹ towards which his face has been set, from the first day when he started on his travels — the main vent², through which all the pent-up enthusiasm accumulated along the line of route is to burst its way out, in one long flow of admiration³ and delight.

The Land’s End! There is something in the very words that stirs us all. It was the name that struck us most, and was best remembered by us, as children, when we learnt our geography. It fills the minds of imaginative people with visions of barrenness and solitude⁴, with dreams of some lonely promontory⁵, far away by itself out in the sea — the sort of place where the last man in England would be most likely to be found waiting for death, at the end of the world! It suggests even to the most prosaically⁶ constituted people, ideas of tremendous storms, of flakes⁷ of foam⁸ flying over the land before the wind, of billows in convulsion, of rocks shaken to their centre, of caves where smugglers lurk¹⁰ in ambush¹¹, of wrecks¹² and hurricanes, desolation, danger, and death. It awakens¹³ curiosity in the most careless — once hear of it, and you long to see it — tell your friends that you have travelled in Cornwall, and ten thousand chances to one, the first question they ask is:—“Have you been to the Land’s End?”

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