When Anthony Hopkins, playing Dr. Robert Ford on HBO's Westworld in 2016, says that Pendeen, Cornwall was "the only happy memory of his childhood," the line lands with people who know the place. Pendeen is a working village on the most westerly inhabited stretch of mainland Britain, a settlement of stone houses and granite churches looking out over a sea that has been mining ore, smuggling brandy, and sinking ships for centuries. It is named for the headland on which its lighthouse stands; it is overshadowed by the Carn, the hill that quarried its church; and it is in mourning, quietly, for the mine that closed in 1990.
Pendeen comes from a Cornish phrase meaning "headland fort." Before the present village existed, the name probably referred to the rocky promontory now occupied by Pendeen Watch lighthouse, or to Pendeen Manor itself - the farmhouse a mile inland that was the birthplace of William Borlase. Borlase (1696-1772) was vicar of nearby St Just for forty years and rector of Ludgvan for fifty; in between parish duties, he wrote the books that essentially founded British prehistoric archaeology. His Antiquities, Historical and Monumental, of the County of Cornwall (1754) was the first systematic survey of an ancient British landscape, and it is impossible to walk the moors around Pendeen today without consulting, in some form, what Borlase first wrote down. The Manor Farm where he was born still stands - a 16th-century farmhouse with a 1670 front, and beneath the buildings a 56-foot Iron Age fogou with a 24-foot side passage. Borlase grew up among the antiquities he later catalogued.
The Church of St John the Baptist stands at the heart of Pendeen, built of granite hauled down from the Carn - the hill that looms over the village - by the villagers themselves between 1850 and 1852. It was designed by the first vicar of the new parish, Robert Aitken, who took as his model Iona Abbey in the Hebrides: thick walls, plain windows, a tower meant to look immovable. The men and women of the village did the building. In 1890 the tower was raised, partly for proportion and partly for a clock with four dials; the architect was Oliver Caldwell and the work cost £270, an enormous sum locally. The parish itself, separated from St Just in 1846 as North St Just, drew together a constellation of small settlements - Bojewyan, Portheras Cross, Boscaswell Downs, Lower Boscaswell, Trewellard, Carnyorth, and part of Botallack - that had always shared the same coast and the same livelihood.
Immediately north of Pendeen, on the cliff edge, sits Geevor Tin Mine. It is impossible to overstate how completely the mine and the village were the same thing for most of the 20th century. Geevor employed Pendeen's men, drank their beer at the North Inn and the Radjel, sponsored their silver marching band and their football club (Pendeen Rovers AFC, who play on the Borlase Park ground that the Borlase family sold to the village for the symbolic sum of £1,000). Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, visited the mine in 1957 and went underground in a hard hat. When Geevor closed in 1990 and the pumps were switched off in 1991, half of working Pendeen had to find something else to do or somewhere else to do it. Many of the men became guides at the new museum, taking visitors down the same shafts they used to ride for a living.
Like most Cornish coastal villages, Pendeen has a smuggling tradition; the cliffs and coves north of the village were ideal for landing untaxed brandy and tobacco. The Reverend F. J. Horsefield's 1893 book Life in a Cornish Village is the great early source, though Horsefield's enthusiasm sometimes ran ahead of his evidence - he was certain that Chûn Castle, the nearby Iron Age hillfort, was Viking, and he believed the Romans had brought enslaved Jews from sacked Jerusalem to work Pendeen's mines two millennia ago. Modern archaeology has revised both ideas, but the book remains a window on what villagers told themselves about their landscape. Below the lighthouse lies the wreck of The Liberty, eroded to almost nothing but still visible at low tide on what locals call Liberty Rock - a favoured fishing spot. The village's largest accessible beach was for decades the home of the wrecked Alacrity, until the army was called in to dismantle her as a hazard to swimmers.
The population of Pendeen today numbers in the hundreds, not the thousands. There is a community centre, a post office, a shop, a primary school - which the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie studied in the 1950s for their work on children's games and rhymes. There is an art club and a gardening club and the Pendeen Silver Band, a brass-band tradition older than most living villagers. Coast FM, the community radio station, broadcasts from somewhere in west Penwith on 96.5 and 97.2. Cornish wrestling tournaments were once held for prizes in the Jubilee field. In 2011, a £600 horror film called Overhill was shot in the village with a cast made up mostly of locals; it premiered at the East End Film Festival in 2013. Above all this the lighthouse still flashes every fifteen seconds, the Carn still looms over the church, and the South West Coast Path leads walkers past Geevor and Levant toward Botallack, where another set of engine houses stands on another cliff. The village does its work.
Located at 50.152°N, 5.662°W on the Penwith peninsula, 3 nm north-northeast of St Just and 7 nm west of Penzance. The village sits at roughly 300 ft elevation along the B3306, overlooked by the Carn (Carn Eanes) to the south and bracketed by Geevor Tin Mine and Pendeen Watch lighthouse to the north. The granite church tower is a useful landmark from the air, as is the Geevor headframe just to the village's north. Land's End Airport (EGHC) is 3 nm south-southwest. Recommended viewing altitude 1,500-2,500 ft. Best photographed from the northwest, looking back toward the village with the lighthouse and Geevor in the same frame.