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From Paddington to Penzance / The record of a summer tramp from London to the Land's End cover

From Paddington to Penzance / The record of a summer tramp from London to the Land's End

Chapter 72: LXVIII.
By Charles G. Harper
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About This Book

A first-person account of a summer journey from London to the western coast, blending practical itinerary notes with evocative scene-setting and local color. The narrator describes towns, coastal views, moors, churches, and roadside personalities encountered while travelling on foot, by boat, and by bicycle, and intersperses historical and antiquarian reflections on coaching, highways, and changing travel customs. Humorous anecdotes and brief portraits of fellow wayfarers punctuate a contemplative, conversational prose, and over a hundred pen-and-ink illustrations and reproduced engravings visually accompany the observations and sketches made along the route.

LXVIII.

Something of this description, though perhaps not so pronounced, is always going forward at Land’s End in the tourist season. Land’s End is effectually vulgarised, and despite Kingsley’s verses, it is impossible to come to it in any other than a scoffing spirit. Read of Land’s End, and retain the majestic ideal conjured up by the name of it. Visit the place, and you find nothing but sordid surroundings.

Saint Germoe’s Chair.

We visited, on another day of happier auspices, Carn Kenidjack and Cape Cornwall,—those grand and lonely bulwarks of the land,—and returned by way of the little township of Saint Just-in-Penwith to Penzance, regaining by this unfrequented route something of the lost romance which had lured us to take this alliterative trip from Paddington to Penzance.

It was now late in the season: cold winds and short days came on apace, with rains that drove the tourists home. We, too, packed our knapsacks for the last time, and presently were whirled up to Paddington and London streets in the Cornishman express.