St. Just & Land's End Area

Gloriously wild and ruggedly beautiful, the St Just & Land's End heritage area stretches from Land’s End to St Ives on the remote westerly tip of Cornwall, and is a remnant of real Cornwall, offering a wealth of natural and man-made treasures.

The Area

This area of Outstanding Natural Beauty boasts a host of unique towns, villages and hamlets each with their own character. In the north, Zennor is famous for its mermaid legends, Pendeen is home to the Geevor Tin Mine (now a museum) and Levant (with its working beam engine) and to the south the fishing village of Sennen to name but a few. In the middle is St. Just-in-Penwith, the largest town in the area in the heart of the World Heritage Area Mining Coast of Cornwall and West Devon.

Ancient stone circles and unique pre-historic field systems mingle with the awesome remains of a once thriving tin and copper industry, and this small stretch of land, where cliff mining first developed, contains the largest, most internationally important and visually imposing concentration of mining monuments in Cornwall. Historic settlements offer an abundance of traditional inns serving local produce and the visual arts thrive here.

Businesses

Reflecting the diversity of the area, there are a large range of businesses from traditional butchers to textile design, from gardeners to art galleries.

Industrial Heritage

Tin has been extracted from this area since the Bronze Age but it was not until the  17th century that tunnels or adits were excavated into cliff faces along the line of mineral veins. In the deep shaft mining of the 18th and 19th centuries, steam engines were used to drain and pump water from below ground. Huge numbers of men, women and children were involved in the industry, and conditions below ground were intensely noisy, wet, dark and dangerous. The area was intensively mined until the general collapse of tin prices in the 1870s, the closure of Geevor mine in Pendeen in 1990 bringing an end to the dramatic pursuit of hard rock mining in the far west of Cornwall. As part of the St Just heritage area regeneration project, many formerly dangerous relics of the mining industry have recently been restored and consolidated so that future generations can witness them in safety.

Stunning Scenery and Coastal Path

The St Just & Land's End area not only boasts Land's End itself, the most westerly point in mainland England but also the country’s only Cape. Very often seals can be seen frolicking in the waves and visitors can walk around the coastal path in relative peace and quiet.

Why this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty is also an Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA)

The heritage area contains one of the richest concentrations of archaeological remains in Europe, covering a living historic landscape of small fields, maritime grassland, cliff and heathland. The unique stone hedged fields and stone walled homesteads that characterise the area have been created by farming over the last 5,000 years, but they need careful management in order to retain their character and continue to support a rich wildlife for future generations to enjoy. To this end, the West Penwith ESA aims to protect and enhance the special landscape character of the area and its wildlife and historic interests. It restores traditional farm buildings, maintains Cornish hedges and walls, builds new ones and offers financial incentives to encourage environmentally friendly work.