Product Description
Land's End, despite its title, is a book about much more than just the windswept and wave-battered Western extremity of Britain: it is a book about Cornwall, its flora and fauna, the landscape and the people who lived there. Written by an acknowledged expert on natural history, Land's End contains authoritative accounts of the animal, bird and plant life of the county, but it is the Cornish people and their distinctive, quasi-independent identity which seems to fascinate him the most. He records his impressions of the people themselves, their farms, the town of Penzance, their manners and morals, the local sense of humour and what he terms 'the poetic spirit' of Cornwall. Full of insightful comments about the people he meets and the places he visits, Hudson's description of West Cornwall is an important work of both the natural and social history of a region of Britain which jealously guards its separate identity to this day.
About the Author
William Henry Hudson was born in 1841 at Quilmes, near Buenos Aires, in Argentina. His childhood and youth were spent on his father's estancia on the Argentina pampas, from where he made many excursions into the remoter parts of the surrounding country, which was to provide ample material for books such as Argentine Ornithology, The Naturalist in La Plata and Idle Days in Patagonia. He moved to Britain in 1869 and, after a period of inaction and poverty, returned to his vocation as a field naturalist and began his prolific writing career. His best-known work is perhaps Green Mansions, a romance set in the wilds of South America, which has never been out of print. He died in London in 1922.
