IMG_8703I’ve been thinking about the sublime lately.

It’s being here, in north Cornwall, where the coastlines are rugged, the cliffs drop suddenly away, and the blue ocean seems to stretch forever.

The landscape is breathtaking. It’s dramatic and beautiful and craggy and flower-covered and enormous. And I feel small—happily, contentedly so.

For a long time, Cornwall was harder to get to from London than Europe. It wasn’t until the 1850s, when the railway opened up the countryside, that city dwellers were able to journey—cheaply and comparatively easily—to such locations.

How far away it must have seemed to travellers then, and how baffling. If I—a creature of the twenty-first century, whose life has prepared her with countless films, photos, books and the internet—still find the sight extraordinary, then what must it have felt like for people in the nineteenth century?

What a literal expansion of horizons is must have been. How stunning and majestic: the very edge of the world.

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No wonder so many poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly those with a fondness for travelling far and walking long, felt nature’s pull so strong on their imaginations. Truth and beauty—there is each aplenty in these landscapes, but it’s not difficult to imagine such places invoking feelings of awe and terror either.

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* The title of this post is from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’.