But there were neither lighthouses nor lightships on these rocks when Athelstane landed at Whitesand Bay on his return from the conquered Scillies. Even now it is an ugly bit of water to traverse, and it must have been worse then. He was probably glad enough to see the great stretch of white sand with Sennen Cove lying in the midst thereof like an emerald set in silver. Later the bay acquired a bad reputation. So far from the madding crowd, so secret and so storm-beaten, it gave evil-doers a sense of security. Who would dare to venture after them among these rocks and clefts? Corsairs, pirates, smugglers, each in turn made use of the white beach. Thither came Perkin Warbeck in 1497 with his four little barques and six score men; thither John Lackland when seeking to dispossess his trusting brother of the realm; thither Stephen, the oath-breaker, who was, however, none so bad a king. Rough are the winds and rougher still the seas that beat upon this lovely bay, and it is a little puzzling why these and other personages should have chosen it as a landing-place.
Alas for romance, this same Land's End is but a low and unimpressive rock which, like the blunt head of some titanic animal, thrusts a grey muzzle into the water. It is only 60 ft. high, yet this is the last stone, the last bit of land, the ultimate west, this west that appeals so strongly to the Cornishman abroad:
"_There's never a wave upon western beaches Falls and fades to a wreath of foam But takes at the last a voice that reaches Over the distance and calls me home._"
The Land's End, strange low headland, has seen plenty of stirring days, from the time when the Danish long-ships came creeping round to harry Cornwall and Devon, to that later date when the great storm and the descendants--probably--of those very Danes sent the great Armada fleeing up the narrow seas. Turner came here for the colour and the wild blue seas, and Tennyson to wonder whether his Arthur had ever been so far south. The rock is of split and tumbled granite, one of the few instances in the duchy where that stone comes into contact with the sea; and if Penwith, as all that part is called, really means the "wooded headland," that barren rock and rough water must once have been far enough apart. A little south of the Land's End is the finer rock of Pordenack, and all round this southern point the bays and coves are charming, the cliffs fine and the caverns and rocks numerous and fantastic. Tol-Pedn (the holed headland--so called from a huge blow-hole) has its Witches' (or Maggy Figgy's) Chair and shelters the pretty hamlet of Porthgwarra, the inhabitants of which are darker than the majority of Cornishmen. Tradition is in favour of a wrecked Spanish galleon. Not, we suppose, the spectre ship of Porthcurnow, a neighbouring cove. There a black square-rigged vessel sails up the beach and up the combe, making no difference between land and water, and presently vanishes like mist--and that in the valley the Eastern Telegraph Company has made its own! The hamlet is interesting on account of its name. That distinguished scholar, Canon Isaac Taylor, says: "Cornwall, or Cornwales, is the kingdom of the Welsh of the Horn," but others think the name is from the Kernyw, the tribe who lived in these parts, they being called the Kernyw Gaels, to distinguish them from the Gaels of Wales and those of Brittany. Be it as it may, in Porthcurnow we have an interesting survival of the old tribal name.