Land’s End

Some years ago, in a second-hand bookshop in Falmouth, I discovered a book by the Cornish artist and archaeologist J.T. Blight. As a young man in the 1850s and ’60s, he had explored Penwith, the western-most region of Cornwall and had written with unusual fervour about the rare birds and flora he discovered there, the spectacular coastal scenery, the folklore and history, the churches and wayside crosses and the strange collection of megalithic chamber tombs and stone circles that can be found on the region’s moors. He completed several books, exquisitely illustrated with his own engravings. As a writer, painter or academic, he could have made his name far beyond his hometown of Penzance, but today he is little known. In his mid-thirties,while engaged with what should have been his greatest book, his career was abruptly ended.