by Tom Fort
In 1982 Charles Neave-Hill put Land’s End up for sale. The National Trust bid for it, but he chose to sell it to a Welsh property developer, David Goldstone. It was a black day for anyone who cares about Britain’s coastline. Under Mr Goldstone’s stewardship, various low-grade visitor attractions were added, and a charge was imposed on visitors who wished to walk through. Five years later Mr Goldstone sold Land’s End for £6.75 million to the property magnate and entrepreneur, Peter de Savary. He spent lavishly on his new acquisition, and in questionable taste, turning it into a King Arthur theme park replete with ‘audio-visual experience’, expanding the hotel and adding various tacky extras. De Savary’s business empire collapsed in the 1990s, and the complex was eventually acquired by the current owners, a Jersey-based ‘private discretionary trust’, Heritage Great Britain, which also owns John O’Groats, the top of Snowdon and other ‘leisure assets’.
Land’s End
Why come to Land’s End?
Wilkie Collins, who visited it in the 1850s, said there was something in the very name that stirred us all, which he likened to the magnetic pull of Jerusalem.
Half a century later W. H. Hudson witnessed the daily arrival of pilgrims from all parts of the kingdom. They came in all weathers and seasons, determined to set their feet on ‘this little rocky promontory’ and look out upon the sea. Some were very old, wrapped in greatcoats, scarves and comforters, sitting – Hudson observed – in dejected attitudes ‘silently gazing in one direction beyond that rocky foreland with the same look of infinite weariness on their grey faces and in their dim sad eyes.’
One day in May Hudson counted more than 1200 trippers arriving at Penzance Station in four trains, having spent twenty-six hours getting there from various cotton towns around Manchester. He talked to them and found none who wanted to see Penzance or the dramatic scenery of Penwith. They came to see Land’s End and Land’s End only, and they had seven hours to get there and back before the trains took them home.
Both Collins and Hudson made the same observation that has occurred to countless other visitors and pilgrims – that visually there is nothing exceptional about Land’s End. There are many other headlands that are bolder, wilder, more dramatic, more rugged, more beautiful, just as violently assaulted by the sea. Hence the sense of anti-climax, the blank look that frames the question put by Hudson: ‘Is this the Land’s End? Is this all?’
Even before it acquired its clutter of commercial enterprises, Land’s End often disappointed observers; or worse, panicked them into solemn bursts of adjectival flatulence, everything stupendous, awful, sublime, colossal and generally displaying what one termed ‘the glorifying impress of multiplicious beauty’. You had to choose your time to avoid the crowds and dodge the clichés. Hudson recommended dusk on a stormy winter’s day to experience ‘the raving of the wind, the dark ocean, the jagged isolated rocks rising in awful blackness from the spectral foam . . . the hoarse sounds of the sea, with throbbing and hollow booming noises in the caverns beneath.’
The poet and author of fairy tales, Ruth Manning-Sanders – who lived near Land’s End most of her life – agreed: ‘It is then that the sense of the primordial, the strange and the savage, the unknown, the very long ago, fills the dusk with something very akin to dread.’
But today you may not do as Hudson, Collins, Dickens, Tennyson, John Wesley and everyone else did, and scramble down to the sea’s edge. It is all fenced off: too dangerous, the owners say. Instead you may, if you wish, submit yourself to the Arthur’s Quest interactive experience or sit back in the specialeffects cinema and feel – literally feel – wind and spray in your face as Ned plunges down in 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. You may thrill to the recreation of a real air-sea rescue, or feed a real pig at the farm and watch real Cornish craftsmen at work engraving glass and tooling leather. You may – not to be missed – have your photograph taken in front of the ‘totally iconic’ Land’s End signpost.
But you may not feel like doing any of these things, as I did not. Instead I ordered a cream tea in the hotel and wondered how it could be that this famous place had been allowed to become and remain such a trashy dump. I repented every unkind thought I had ever had about the National Trust, and every unkind word I may have written. A hundred years ago that singular and melancholic observer, W. H. Hudson, ended his book The Land’s End with a plea for it to be cleared of all the rubbishy, tacky shops and cafés and bungalows and the rest, and placed into public ownership. I wished for the same.
My cream tea arrived. The scone was stale and powdery but I ate it anyway. I thought about how far I had come from Dover, and all the ups and downs and the blessed flat stretches. I had not solved any great mysteries nor uncovered any startling truths. I had seen much and learned much, but I was sure I had overlooked plenty as well.
Listening and watching the sea often has the effect of emptying the mind of clutter and concentrating it on simple matters. After a little time I stopped thinking about myself and my journey, and surrendered myself to the sound of the waves breaking insistently against the rocks below.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The idea that led to this book was Harry Marshall’s, and I am most grateful to him for letting me run with it. My friend Jason Hawkes has provided the pictures out of the goodness of his heart, and I owe deep gratitude to him. My agent, Caroline Dawnay, has yet again shown that no writer could have a better friend and supporter. I am also very appreciative of the support given to me by Mike Jones, who was instrumental in commissioning the book on behalf of Simon & Schuster. Jo Whitford has been patient and responsive in seeing the book through to publication. I would like to thank Garry Walton for his uplifting cover, and Colin Midson for his map and much else. The final text owes a great deal to the forensic copy-editing of Sally Partington, who has given me much invaluable help. Any blunders that survive are my fault, not hers.
I would have been lost without our wonderful public libraries and their local-studies sections, and all the help given to me by their courteous and well-informed staff.
I owe more than I can say to my wife, Helen. Without her support and forbearance, this book and its predecessors would not have been written.
INDEX
Abbotsbury, Dorset:
swans, ref1
Sir Giles Strangways, ref1
abbey and medieval barn, ref1
cricket ground, ref1
Mrs Charlotte Townshend, ref1
Abercrombie, Sir Patrick, town planner, ref1
‘Abide With Me’, hymn:
written by Henry Francis Lyte, ref1
sung at FA Cup Final, ref1
Adur, river, ref1, ref2
Agincourt, Battle of, ref1, ref2
Albert, Prince:
dislike of Brighton, ref1
enthusiasm for serpentine, ref1
Aldwick, Sussex:
George V, ref1
Lady Diana Cooper, ref1
Blackshirt holiday camp, ref1
Algiers:
Barbary pirates, ref1
put to flames, ref1
All Saints, Brixham:
Festival of the Sea, ref1
Henry Francis Lyte, ref1
All Saints, Wyke Regis:
position, ref1
graveyards, ref1
Alum, crystalline salt, ref1
Amelia, Princess, daughter of George V, in Worthing, ref1
Anson HMS, frigate wrecked on Loe Bar, ref1
Arcadia for All, book by Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, ref1, ref2
Armada, Spanish:
sails up Channel, ref1, ref2
passes Bolt Head, ref1
defeated off Gravelines, ref1
hospital ships, ref1
Arun District Council, ref1
Attenborough, Richard, actor and film director:
appears in Brighton Rock, ref1
directs Oh! What A Lovely War, ref1
Augustine, brings Christianity to Kent, ref1
Avon, river, estuary, ref1
Axe, river:
meets the sea, ref1
rise and fall, ref1
and Seaton, ref1
Axmouth, Devon,
ref1
Babbacombe, Devon, ref1, ref2
Baird, John Logie, pioneer of television, death in Bexhill, ref1
Baker, Captain Godfrey, patron of Sake Deen Mahomet, ref1
Ball, Martin, historian of Weymouth, ref1
Ballard Down, Dorset, ref1
Bantham, Devon, ref1
Barbary pirates, raids in Cornwall, ref1
Baring, Maurice, writer, on the Church of St Peter the Poor Fisherman, ref1
Baring, Ned, Lord Revelstoke, banker:
acquires Revelstoke estate, ref1
builds church in Noss Mayo, ref1
Barings Bank, downfall, ref1
Barrington, Daines, 18th century antiquarian:
meets Dolly Pentreath, ref1
declares Cornish a dead language, ref1
Barton golf course, ref1
Barton-on-Sea, Hampshire:
erosion, ref1
‘Wind and widows’, ref1
more boring than Bournemouth, ref1
Bathing:
health benefits, ref1
naked, ref1
public decency, ref1
Francis Kilvert, ref1
general cover-up, ref1
Jane Austen, naked or not, ref1
Battles With Giant Fish, book by F. A.
Mitchell-Hedges, ref1
Beach huts:
Goring, ref1
mocked by Paul Theroux, ref1
West Wittering, ref1
Hengistbury Head, ref1
Beaches:
formation of, ref1
shingle, ref1
Beachy Head, Sussex:
conveniently situated, ref1
celebrity status, ref1
atmosphere, ref1
described by Richard Jefferies, ref1
Beaton, Cecil, photographer, miserable at St Cyprian’s, ref1
Beer, Devon:
Jack Rattenbury, ref1
Head, ref1
geology, ref1
Beesands, Devon, ref1
Berry Head, Devon:
Henry Lyte, ref1