Land's End is the most westerly point of mainland England. It is not, despite the marketing, the most westerly point of mainland Great Britain. That title belongs by a slim margin to Corrachadh Mor, a headland on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the Scottish Highlands, which sits 23 miles further west. The Cornish name is Pedn an Wlas, meaning end of the land or land's end, an honest translation. The actual tip of the headland, called Peal Point, is hardly more impressive than the headlands either side of it, Pedn-men-dhu above Sennen Cove to the north and Pordenack to the south. The present hotel and tourist complex sits 200 yards south of the geographical end of England, at a small headland called Carn Kez where, in the 19th century, horses brought visitors from Penzance to look at the view.

The phrase end to end is shorthand in Britain for an 838-mile journey to John o' Groats on the far north-east coast of Scotland, undertaken by walkers, runners, cyclists, motorists and the occasional unicycle rider. The earliest recorded crossing was made on foot in 1879 by R. H. Carlisle, who set out from Land's End on 23 September, reached John o' Groats and walked back to Land's End again, finishing on 15 December: 72 days of walking, not counting Sundays, covering 3,899 miles in all. He kept a log book stamped at every post office to prove the journey. Within a year, two members of the Canonbury Bicycle Club in London had cycled the route in thirteen days. The Hon. Ion Keith-Falconer broke their time the next summer. Every charity end-to-end since has descended from those obscure Victorian wagers.

The cliffs are made of granite, an igneous rock that resists weathering and leaves the kind of steep, blocky cliff faces that climbers love and ships fear. Two varieties are visible at the headland. Close to the hotel, the granite is coarse-grained, with phenocrysts of orthoclase feldspar sometimes more than five inches across, large enough to spot from a distance as pale crystals embedded in the rock. To the north, near the First and Last House, the granite is finer-grained, with fewer and smaller crystals, and weathers more smoothly. Both belong to the Land's End granite pluton, dated to 268 to 275 million years ago, the Permian period. The Longships Lighthouse, a mile offshore, stands not on this pluton but on the older country rock the magma intruded into. Geology is the underlying story of everywhere in Cornwall.

Two of the promontories at Land's End carry the most peculiar names of any in the British Isles. The westernmost is Dr Syntax's Head, christened after a fictional character invented by William Combe in his 1809 comic verse The Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, a satire of the period's vogue for landscape connoisseurship. The neighbouring promontory is Dr Johnson's Head, after Samuel Johnson, who in his 1775 essay Taxation no Tyranny had imagined a hypothetical Cornish declaration of independence. There is, as far as anyone knows, no record of why two literary figures with no particular Cornish connection were honoured by naming bits of England's western edge after them. The names persist nonetheless on the Ordnance Survey, slightly absurd, completely permanent.

The Longships, a low chain of rocky islets, sit just over a mile offshore. Twenty-eight miles to the south-west lie the Isles of Scilly. The Seven Stones reef, where the Torrey Canyon grounded in 1967, lies between them. In Arthurian tradition, all three are remnants of the lost land of Lyonesse, drowned in a single night when the sea rose. The modern Land's End is rather different. The First and Last Inn at Sennen owned a small hostelry at Carn Kez where Victorian horses were stabled while their owners walked the cliffs; that building grew, by stages, into the Land's End Hotel and an attached visitor complex that has changed hands several times and now operates as Heritage Great Britain. Each August, the complex hosts Magic in the Skies, a firework spectacular with music by Christopher Bond and narration by Miriam Margolyes. In May 2012, Land's End welcomed worldwide cameras as the official starting point of the Olympic torch relay before the London Games. The torch left Cornwall heading east. Most things do.