FAR WESTERN HORIZONS
Life, Landscape, and Legend
in Scilly and West Cornwall
John Penrose
Tales from a Ritual Landscape
Where the land falls away and the sea gathers its breath, the old stories rise. Far Western Horizons is a journey to the far edge of Britain, where Scilly and West Cornwall stand like ancient sentinels at the rim of the world. Here, the horizon is not a boundary but a beckoning—an open door into the half‑remembered realms of myth. In these wind‑carved islands and granite coasts, the past does not sleep; it walks beside you in the salt air.
This collection moves through that liminal country where folklore is woven into the tides, where the voices of saints, sailors, giants, and buccas drift through the heather. Each piece—whether shaped in formal rhyme, lyrical prose, dialect, Kernewek, or the braided chorus of many voices—becomes a charm, a spell, a whispered invocation of the Celtic soul.
Far Western Horizons is not a guidebook but a lantern held up to the spirit of the West. It is an intimate portrait of a land defined by its thresholds: sea and sky, memory and myth, the living and the long‑departed. For locals, wanderers, and dreamers drawn to the world’s western edge, these pages offer a deep immersion in a place where time folds, legends breathe, and the weather itself seems to carry messages from the ancient world.
This is a work that marries modern witness with timeless cadence—a tapestry of stories as shifting and luminous as Cornish light. It offers a bold re‑envisioning of Celtic lore, bridging the old enchantments with the emotional clarity of the present age.
THE LAST BOAT FROM SAMSON
My twin hills sit like empty thrones,
Of bracken, sand, and granite bones.
Where once our hearths kept steady glow,
Against the Atlantic’s endless throe.
The roofless walls we built to last,
Now shadows of a living past;
Our garden plots lie blind with thrift,
Sea‑fog rolls through every rift.
Eighteen‑fifty‑five, the order came,
The Lord Proprietor spoke ..........