Original Size
The mechanical restoration of this Logan Rock to its position, and the appliances necessary to keep it in balance, give an artifical air to the whole, and we were glad to turn away to the stupendous cliff scenery, pursuing a path along the rocks to the Land’s End, where every point has its old Cornish name, and where the combinations of form and outline, if less imposing than on the northern shore, are still very fine. The granite of which this southern line of coast is composed is more rugged and massive, if less variously picturesque, and the admirer of coast scenery who has explored the two districts—from Boscastle to Tintagel, and from the Logan Rock to the Land’s End—has little’ more to see or to learn.
The great western promontory has been so often described that we need but refer to our artist’s delineation. The low descending promontory, from the great cliff rampart behind, the narrowness of the “neck of land” between “two unbounded seas,”—to adopt the phrase of Charles Wesley’s well-known hymn, here written,—the rocky islands near, on which the lighthouse stands, and the ever-chafing restless surge, make up a picture which fills the imagination in many after days.
From this point “the vast expanse of ocean is at all times a grand spectacle; it is terrible when a fierce westerly gale levels before it the whole flow of the sea, driving forward one blinding sheet of foam, even to the summit of the Land’s End precipice; but it is yet more solemn in its quieter mood, when, with little wind stirring, the vast billows, propagated from some centre of storms far in the Atlantic, come slowly to break on the rocks in measured cadences of thunder, the very types of enormous power in repose.”
But it was now time to turn our thoughts and our course homeward.
Very reluctantly, we left the south of Cornwall unvisited—the Lizard Point, Kynance Cove, and the magnificent harbour of Falmouth, with its flanking castles of Pen-dennis and St. Mawes.
Then there were the great southern towns of Devonshire, with their beauties manifold,—Plymouth and Torquay, with the lovely little watering-places of Teignmouth and Dawlish, and stately Exeter itself. On previous occasions we had visited them all, had spent long dreamy hours in Anstey’s Cove, then comparatively unvisited by excursionists, had tenanted humble lodgings at Babbicombe Bay, before the villas were built, and had sailed down the lovely winding Dart to Dartmouth, with its harbour among the hills. The natural beauties are still there, though art has done much of its best or its worst with them since those days. But we must now pass them all by, only in imagination breathing their soft southern airs, or casting hasty glances at one or other of them from the carriage windows of the romantic South Devon Railway. For we have tarried amid the attractions of the far west until the latest possible moment. At six in the morning we leave Penzance; at six in the evening we are in London.