By MJ Malleck// Today’s postcard is not written on or sent. A souvenir then. It says, “Land’s End”. It was published in London but printed in the Republic of Ireland.
Land’s End is the southernmost tip of England, located in the county of Cornwall. It’s about 1,400 km (870 miles) from the northernmost point of Great Britain. A popular feat is to travel between these two points (from Land’s End to John o’Groats). In Cornish, Land’s End is Pedn-an-Laaz.
The postcard
features the famous granite cliffs of Land’s End. Two types of granite are
found, one coarse with large crystals and one finer with smaller crystals.
In the top
photograph you can also see the Longship Lighthouse in the distance, about a
mile from the mainland on a reef. Our travellers likely ate at The First &
Last Inn, which was built in the 1600s one mile from the coast and was a
headquarters for smugglers and wreckers. Donkeys with lanterns were walked up
and down the cliff-tops to fool ships into coming too close and creating
shipwrecks. By the 1800s smugglers were stealing tea, and silks and brandy
coming from France.
The lighthouse in the
picture is the second to be built on Carn Bras, the highest islet at 12 metres
above sea level. The first Longships Lighthouse was begun in 1793 by Henry
Smith, who’d won a fifty-year lease agreement. However, he underestimated the
cost and time involved in the project and could not levy dues on ships until it
was operational. He took out expensive loans he could not pay, and sadly, he ended
up in debtor’s prison. (An early tale of entrepreneurship unrewarded.) That
first lighthouse was lit on September 29, 1795. It was designed by Wyatt and
was three storeys high and built of granite, with a copper-covered dome.
In the last “Box
of Postcard” entry I learned about the role of golf architects; people who
design golf courses. Well, designing lighthouses is another field I had never
considered. The second light house was designed by Sir James Nicholas Douglass,
a prolific lighthouse builder and designer. In his first solo project, the
Smalls Lighthouse, Douglass used the idea of dovetailed granite blocks for
strength, something engineer John Smeaton came up with for the third Eddystone
lighthouse, a dangerous location also in Cornwall. Later, Douglass would be hired
to build a replacement for Smeaton’s tower, and when completed in 1882 the
project earned him a knighthood. The lighthouse had been built under budget and
with no loss of life. Sounds like a good project manager was appreciated even
then.
Douglass’ Longships
Lighthouse was begun in 1869. It is also made of granite stones and the lens
array used an 8-wick oil lamp. Douglass was an advocate for oil lamps over gas
lights which were being studied by John Richardson Wigham in County Dublin,
Ireland. Douglass argued the light was ex-focal and useless.
If you’d like
to understand Wigham’s point-of-view, you can read his “Gas for Lighthouses” in
the Journal of the Society of Arts, March 17, 1882, here
The top right photo also shows a young
boy sitting on the rocks at the cliff’s edge (no mother in sight, I’m sure he’s
a model for the postcard photographer!) Notice he has red hair. Less than two
percent of the world’s population have red (sometimes called copper) hair. The
highest number of redheads are in Ireland at 10% of the population. In Scotland
it is 6%, with the highest concentration found in the city of Edinburgh.
Finally, I wondered if Lands’ End, the successful
American retailer, was named after Land’s End. The founder Gary Comer was
thinking of Cornwall when he started selling sailboat equipment in 1963. However,
his first catalogue was misprinted with a typo (the apostrophe in the wrong
place). Rather than reprint the promotional materials at high cost, he adopted
the new version of the name. How’s that for a frugal, and successful,
entrepreneur? What a contrast to poor Henry Smith.
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