by Zach Rhodes
From a squat lookout tower on Pedn-mên-du point, I scan the island’s epilogue. The “Graveyard of Ships,” is also a home. My grandparents have sworn for twenty-five summers that this is the best view in Cornwall. Today, I’m inclined to believe them.
The Atlantic’s usual sulking grey, peeled back by the August sun, reveals Tiffany blue waters that might belong to the Mediterranean, seafoam-green towards the shore. The old name, meaning “black stone headland,” is belied by mottled lichen spreading like peach fuzz across the granite.
Looking north-east, the sea curves towards Cape Cornwall, encompassing Penwith and Sennen Cove in an (unusually) warm embrace. Ah, the lesser-celebrated benefits of global warming!
The cove sits 140 feet below me forming a horseshoe of cottage roofs around Sennen’s white sand beach. The air is rich with the laughter of testosterone-fuelled teen boys leaping off the Harbour wall. The wind is a restless surge.
A lighthouse notches the line between sea and sky, marking the western point of our national compass.
Further south, Albion’s final attempt at reigning in the sea crumbles: Land’s End.
Lichened higgledy-piggledy with buildings and amusements, it juts out like Britain’s snaggle tooth. Tourists pay to get a picture with the signpost, its label were more Instagrammable than the view itself.
For an extra fee you can play scrabble with the thing and have your own name displayed opposite LANDS END in its monochrome glory: YOURS TRULY, ANOTHER GULLIBLE PRAT.
Opposite the cliff-edge, mounds of purple and white bell heather flecked with gorse roll like a sea of their own. I place my palm on the springy sharp furze and push. The flowers’ scent is coconut and vanilla. I recall my grandma’s old saying: ‘When the gorse is out of bloom, kissing’s out of fashion.’
Here it flowers year-round. But Romance is a close cousin to the Gothic, and turning seaward I seem to see an uncanny shape rising from the waves, a cairn of striking size and strange beauty.
Its quadrangular base defies tide and time, tapering upwards to a smooth summit. Above, the rhomboid capstone tilts impossibly to the west, as if it were a person leaning into a gale, and I remember it from my grandma’s stories: The Irish Lady.
The story goes that for three days and nights a woman clung here after her ship was destroyed, awaiting a rescue that never came. For centuries unlucky fishermen have claimed to have seen her — a woman holding a faded rose between her teeth sitting on the rock and gazing seaward. She is a notoriously bad omen.
I stand for a moment, watching. With a little imagination the finial becomes a lady in a long black robe, advancing into the waves.
Between mottled boulders and runs an uneven path, then thatched grass suddenly gives way to dirt and dirt to a fifty-foot drop.
Below, sprawled across the cove, rots the carcass of a cargo ship, and Royal Mail Ship, no less, the RMS Mülheim, which left Cork and ran aground here in 2003. Split in two she lies wedged like a fishbone in the throat of the cliff. Rusting in the spray, her ribs bleed iron oxide into the rock-pools.
Officially, the watchman in charge caught his trousers on a chair, knocked himself out and left his vessel to her fate — the only shipwreck in history caused by haberdashery.
Unofficially, as a greasy old fisherman in the First and Last pub assured me, ‘They was all drunk.’
A rope and sign — SHARP METAL HAZARD — attempt to keep visitors away. They are unsuccessful. Cornwall’s ghosts are more persuasive than its guidelines.
“The sailors here say that when someone drowns, their voices can be heard long after,” grandma would whisper in mock-seriousness. Memory must work that way, too. She’d sit up straighter then, teasing a smile, and sing the sailors’ mourning song in her ululating mezzo:
“Her gaze is where the weltering waves
Thunder along the trembling strand.
She heeds not how the mad storm raves
Her lovers voice come to the land.”
As a child I found it comforting. Now, I wonder who “she” is, and when the sailors first began to sing to her. I picture the Irish Lady, half-turned, voice asking countless passing ships for one to take her home. Perhaps, like the officer aboard the RMS Mülheim, some heard her.
Six-thousand ships have been claimed by this coast. What time cannot wash away, Cornwall keeps as myth.
