I hadn’t been expecting it to be so busy when I arrived at 6pm. Usually, even in the middle of the holiday season one can come here in the early evening and find that most of the tourists have gone back to their hotels and campsites, but tonight the car park was as full as I’d ever seen it. What on earth was going on? Why was there an endless queue of cars still arriving? Was Taylor Swift making an appearance and nobody had told me? I parked the van in the area reserved for coaches along with a handful of motorhomes that had got here before me, and phoned Ali to grumble about it. She happened to be at her sister’s house when I rang. “Firework night every Tuesday and Thursday,” I was told. “Starts at ten. You could photograph the fireworks.” Her sister had been here the previous week. She loves that sort of thing - I groaned in response. I’d come here for a bit of peace and quiet and some sea views, but clearly this wasn’t the night for that. I began to cook an early supper, trying not to grimace in front of the hordes as they trooped past the open side door in vast numbers. Land’s End had been one of several locations under consideration for the evening. I doubt whether any of the other places I’d been thinking of going to had a firework display lying in wait.
Dinner over, I reluctantly joined the hordes, initially heading north along the path towards Sennen Cove, before changing my mind. Everywhere I wandered, there were groups of people milling about aimlessly, queuing up for Instaselfies and ice cream. “Hands off she's my-yine!” came the refrain from somewhere inside the complex. Not Taylor then, but a two-tone tribute band. Down at the end of the peninsula, a crowd had gathered, a forest of phones pointing towards Longships lighthouse as if they were one huge multi-limbed organism. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see where the first one ended and the last began. The thing about a lot of us landscape photographers is that we’re introverted types at heart, with nothing more frightening to us than our fellow humans. But I was here now, and I’d have to just suck it up and get on with it. Besides which, you don’t have to walk very far to get away from almost everyone else. Fortunately, only a few ever seem to stray far along the coast path, and there were one or two more unfamiliar compositions I wanted to look at again. I headed south, and within a few short minutes began to relax as the din behind me ebbed away on the evening air.
There was another reason why this probably wasn’t the right evening to be here. Despite the heather and gorse being in full bloom, offering carpets of complementary purple and yellow, there was no light to speak of. Had I come here twenty-four hours earlier instead of lazing pathetically on the sofa at home, there might have been more than that soft band of orange on the distant horizon to work with. Once again it was a case of just going with what I had, working with the elements rather than against them. At least it was quiet now. The Land’s End visitor centre was out of sight from here on the cliffs. Finally it was just me and the gulls, watching the endless ocean at play on the rocks below. Here, granite crops rose up from the earth, enormous gothic cathedral buttresses that defined the sheer landscape around them. But I needed to use what light there was, and this wasn’t the right evening to try and catch the colours of the land and the coastal cathedrals and the heather at my feet.
Ironically, I ended up at the familiar viewpoint, overlooking the arch, the Armed Knight and Longships, the horizon beyond receding into a thin envelope of colourful light. For now, and bearing in mind that the fireworks were still more than an hour away, this was the only show in town, and one that’s always worth opening the shutter for, no matter how many times you might have photographed it before. And on this mild summer evening, the calm sea was begging for a ten stop kind of image to smooth everything out. Encouraged by a certain long exposure specialist who was sharing his thoughts from three hundred miles along the south coast, I finished off stealing this six hundred and thirty-five second blue hour monster from the approaching night. All I’ll add is that an awful lot of sensor hotspots had to die in the editing suite later.
I looked at my watch. It was just over thirty minutes until the show began, and even now, more cars were arriving, the attendants trying their best to squeeze them into the bulging car park. I could stay and watch the fireworks, and then be stuck in queues all the way back to Penzance afterwards. As it’s the last stop before the ocean, there’s only one road out of here, and it’s a slow route at the best of times. And was I that bothered about seeing a firework display? Not really. As the anticipation built around me and things were kicking off, it was time to get out of here and head for home.
