Cornwall (England : County) -- Description and travel
Almost due west of Penzance is the mining region, where until lately
there was great activity, now comparatively still. St. Just is the
centre of this district; but it is not what one would expect in a
mining town. Right in the heart of it, where now the children make their
playground, is a great amphitheatre, one of the best known and preserved
of the many like it that at one time held hundreds of Cornish folk to
watch the open-air plays that delighted their hearts until Wesley's
teaching made them think them wrong. After that they served as
meeting-places for Wesley himself in many instances. The church, with
some peculiarly quaint frescoes, and the Plan-an-guare, the plane as it
is called locally, give St. Just a character of its own. Down one
terrific hill, falling at an angle that no one unless he lived in
Cornwall would dare to make a road, and up another, is Botallack, with
its well-known mine, now stilled, and the taint of the red tin is felt
in earth and air for many a mile beyond.
IV
FURTHEST WEST AND FURTHEST SOUTH
It has been the invariable creed of every writer on Cornwall that
visitors seeing the Land's End for the first time must be disappointed
with it. Disappointment there may be after a very cursory inspection,
but it is evanescent. It only lasts as one approaches across the flat
ugly ground where sodden patches of raw earth lie in ridges, and the dun
walls of the unsightly hotel present their dreariest side to the
newcomers. Particularly is this so in the height of the season, when
public vehicles of every variety and degree of manginess decorate the
landscape and the picture-postcard craze is at its strongest.
But those who stay long enough to see the place quietly or those who
visit it in the winter when there are few disturbers of the peace, tell
another story.
The reef of broken and pinkish tinged granite, decorated by weird
streaks of brilliant yellow lichen, is frequented by "guides" who point
out fancy resemblances to faces in the weather carven rocks. The reef is
small; there is not much that is grand about it; but if one sits there
while the sun sinks, a glowing ball, into the sea exactly opposite, and
the ruby and diamond points of the lighthouses flash out far and wide,
and perhaps a clear pale sickle moon begins to sharpen in outline in the
fading sky, there is plenty on which to exercise the imagination. The
granite, being split by the action of the weather into long columns, and
divided again horizontally into blocks, gives the impression of a series
of obelisks built up of separate stones. The general effect is rather
like the famous cavern at Staffa. In places however the rocks are split
into such massive and even-edged blocks that it is very difficult to
disentangle the natural from the artificial, and one often imagines
oneself to be gazing at the ruins of a castle which is really only some
cloven cliff hammered by natural elements and not by tools of man's
making.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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