30 THE LAND'S END 



westernmost part of England, containing seventy-five 

 or eighty square miles of hilly and moorland country, 

 in great part treeless, with a coastline, from bay to 

 bay, of about thirty miles. Following the coast, one 

 does not wish them more : the most enthusiastic 

 lover of an incult nature, who delights in forcing his 

 way over rocky barriers and through thickets of 

 furze, bogs and rills innumerable, will find these thirty 

 miles as satisfying as any sixty elsewhere. And the 

 roughest, therefore most exhilarating, portion of the 

 coast is that between St. Ives and Land's End, a dis- 

 tance of about twenty miles. This strip of country 

 has been called the Connemara of Cornwall. William 

 Gilpin, that grand old seeker after the picturesque at 

 the end of the eighteenth century, once journeyed 

 into Cornwall, but got no further than Bodmin, as he 

 saw nothing but " a barren and naked country, in all 

 respects as uninteresting as can well be conceived," 

 and he was informed that west of Bodmin it was no 

 better. It is, indeed, worse, and one wonders what 

 his feelings would have been had he persevered to 

 the very end to rough "Connemara" and flat, naked 

 Bolerium ! His strictures on the scenery would have 

 amused the present generation. For all that repelled 

 Gilpin and those of his time in nature, the barren or 

 " undecorated," as he would say, the harsh and savage 

 and unsuited to human beings, now most attracts us. 

 And of all places inhabited by man this coast country 

 is the most desert-like and desolate in appearance. 

 The black, frowning, wave-beaten cliffs on the one 

 hand, the hills and moors on the other, treeless, 



