Superlatively Cornwall

A year ago I was waking up in England.

I was going to sleep at night to the sound of the sea pounding on a Cornish shore and opening my eyes in the morning to the carol of robins and the cry of gulls outside the open casement. Lying amid downy pillows, drowsily bewitched by the glitter and dance of crystalline light upon green, growing things. Stealing to the window seat to lean out and drink in the eternal freshness that is the essence of England.

Dearly as I had anticipated this trip, familiar and beloved of old as was the English countryside to my exiled heart, I never could have dreamed what the West Country would come to mean to Philip and me. How this particular bit of Cornwall would enslave us for life in a captivity we’d never wish our freedom from and would haunt us to the point of pain upon the slightest remembrance. We’ve been remembering with a vengeance this month, all those bright, blessed days of high adventure out in a little car we’d named Black Bess, with a picnic in the back and the AA atlas spread open on my knees and no earthly idea where we’d end up. Meandering lanes so narrow the ferns and campions brushed both of Bess’ sides at once. Sailing over golden, wheat-stubbled uplands with startling flashes of sapphire sea glimpsed between the hedges, and scuttling down cobbled streets into Cornish villages that seemed to clutch for sheer life to the cliffs that encased them.

There were whole days on foot, as well, when our peregrinations took us high among the cliffs themselves, their sheer faces silvered in the light of the sun and the aquamarine waters seething and foaming on the rocks far below. The dizzying precipice before us and the romance of headlands green and misty with distance to the east and the west seemed the stuff of legend come to life. By the end of our sojourn we knew them all by name and most by fond association. Sandwiches in the field bag and blackberries from the hedgerows were manna and ambrosia on those days, and there was always a bit of a village to dip down into via a steep footpath for a pint of ale or a bracing cup of tea or some Cornish ice cream.

One afternoon our wanderings took us as far as St. Michael’s Mount, and after enjoying the property—a former castle turned residence reached only by boat at high tide—we decided to venture on towards Land’s End, the westernmost tip of England.

“Might as well,” Philip said. “We’re that close.”

So accordingly we navigated unmarked roads winding along the coast and down into villages that seemed to have been forgotten for centuries. But as we drew near to Land’s End itself I began to have some forebodings, and upon sight of the long queue of cars and the monstrous shopping plaza crowning the famous point, we kept going without a second thought, congratulating ourselves on a disaster averted. The quandary of tea presented itself as a serious one, however, for I taken hold upon the thought of our portable refreshment in view of a lovely sweep of Cornish coast with the tenacity of a rat terrier. Unspoilt was a requisite; deserted would be a plus. (And only Philip can tell just how grudgingly I relinquish such a notion once embraced…)

“I wonder what Cape Cornwall is,” I mused, my finger on the map.

“Let’s find out!” said my adventurous husband.

The guidebook informed us that it had once been thought the westernmost point in England until more accurate mapping awarded that distinction to Land’s End. As we crested the last hill and looked down upon the scene that opened before us—the turf-covered hills sweeping to dramatic cliffs, Highland cattle grazing placidly among crumbling stone walls, a blue sea crashing its violence upon deserted rocks and a high mount crowned with the remains of an engine chimney from the long-vanished days of tin mining—we both had the same thought.

I uttered it first:

“I’m glad—glad—this isn’t the westernmost point!”

How we love and smile over the British superlative, in constant employment to distinguish one wonder of earth or architecture from another in a realm crowded with such miracles: the smallest medieval church in England; the tallest steeple on the north coast of Devon; the widest girth of oaks in Herefordshire.

But to think of such a characterization spoiling so majestic a place—as we’d seen it done just down the road—was too painful to contemplate. And so we didn’t. We grabbed our tea satchel out of the back of Black Bess and we started off immediately over one of those green pastures, passing through a gate in the stone wall with a friendly sign reminding us to close it behind, making our way down among the grazing cattle. Behind us, the high, bracken-covered hills glowing russet in the afternoon sunlight. Before, the towering mount, rock-strewn and forbidding even in its mantle of grass and wild flowers. Only once were we given pause in our merry objective: a bull lifted his head from the turf he was nibbling, pawed the ground rather half-heartedly, and started to advance, piqued, no doubt, by my scarlet skirt which was flapping a challenge in the wind. We edged by with a pacifying word or two and a noticeable sigh of relief.

A footpath led down among the cliffs on the eastern side of the mount, and it was there by swift and mutual agreement that we decided to pause for our tea: there where the land ended at the terrible beauty of cliffs falling sheer to the roiling tempest below and where silence deferred to the terrible music of the sea breaking on time-blackened rocks. I dropped down upon the soft turf in my billowing red skirt and stared, trying to seal it all upon my memory in every particular. Off to the northeast, more green-capped cliffs and the remains of another engine house, ghostly, strangely symbolic of Cornwall and the natural resources that have failed them again and again. Closer by, a singe white cottage clinging to the cliffs like a seagull roosting momentarily, and the great diadem of a Victorian mansion crowning the hill above. The sea pounding so fearsomely below that it made me giddy to peer over the cliff’s edge. The pure white of the spray and the shocking blue of the clear water. The sea birds wheeling above our heads. The lovely and mighty headlands dreaming in the golden haze of a late afternoon in September. The Isles of Scilly, a dim outline on the western horizon, the very embodiment of ‘fairie lands forlorn’. It was so beautiful, so simply breathtaking, that it seared and stabbed and kindled a longing that was akin to despair.

I know it now for what it was, for what it meant. It was Homesickness. For a place I’ve never seen and a Country towards which all the beauty of this world stands as waymarkers.

I have never felt so unequal to the description of a place or the impression it made on me, but as we were sitting there together in the wind, a prospect of unearthly beauty all around us and a bracing cup of West Country tea in our hands, I smiled over at Philip.

“It would have been worth it,” I told him, breaking our silence, “the money saved, the hassle of leaving, the flight over, traveling halfway around the world, just if we’d come for this one moment alone. This is enough.”

Even the terror and folly of scrambling out on the natural bridge that spanned out from the cliff at our feet was a wild sort of gift of the place. A foot-wide passage dropping sheer on either hand to jagged rocks and boiling sea far below, the narrow sides of which seemed to shrink and deteriorate even as one traversed it—my sickening fear and the laughing relief of safe ground again only made the romance more real.

“Whatever possessed me to go out on that crumbling bridge?” I asked Philip a few evenings ago amid the tame, domestic shadows of our front porch, shuddering involuntarily though the night was warm. “Was I crazy?”

“Yes,” he laughed with satisfaction. “But you remember it, don’t you?”

I remember it. I will remember it with pain and joy and sadness and longing all the days of my life. I will remember standing on top of the mount itself, feeling that close to the Heaven it made me ache for. I will remember the lingering walk back through the green hill fields, past the tiny ruin of ‘the oldest Christian chapel in Cornwall’ with cows grazing around it, through the friendly gate that had admitted us to such outer courts. I will remember leaning over that final stone wall with a loving, desperate eye and then turning to go without looking back.

I think I will remember it even in Heaven.