Olympic torch route - Day 1 Land's End

Land's End

The most westerly point in England, looking out upon the wild waters of the Atlantic, with no land between it and America except the Scilly Islands, some 20 miles off-shore,They are clearly seen on clear evenings, when they take on the likeness of black spots on the sun as it sinks below the horizon,
The granite cliffs of Land's End are only some 60ft in height, and the scenery there is not so impressive as at Cape Cornwall, to the north, nor as the grand cliffs and rocks at Chair Ladder, Tol-pedn-Penwith and St Levan, to the south. But the spot is always visited in summer by crowds of excursionists. 

Penzance 10, John o'Groats 876 miles
London 303¾ miles 

          From The Dunlop Book 1920

Land's End is in the parish of Sennen, Cornwall. It is part of the Poor Law Union and registration district of Penzance, and the diocese of Exeter. There are browsable (but not indexed) images of the parish registers online at FamilySearch. These and other records are held at the Cornwall Record Office.

The parish contains a number of listed buildings, including the First and Last House at Land's End.  There is more information about Sennen on Vision of Britain, and historic photographs on the English Heritage Archives site. Cornwall is one of the counties with an Online Parish clerks site, where Sennen has its own page.

 

Parish registers online

FamilySearch is the biggest and best-known site for parish register indexes, but it isn't the only one.

A number of English counties have Online Parish Clerks, volunteer transcribers who 'adopt' parishes and  put the results online, free of charge.

They are all works in progress, but worth a look if your county of interest is listed here.

Cornwall
Dorset
Essex
Hampshire
Kent
Lancashire
Somerset
Sussex
Warwickshire
Wiltshire

The Online Parish Clerks have are separate sites for each county, but another site worth searching is FREEREG, which includes transcriptions from many counties in England, Wales and Scotland.

Many printed parish register transcripts can be downloaded from The Internet Archive including publications by Phillimore and Co, and some parish register societies.

Better yet are free digitised images of parish registers, and you will find these for some parishes in Kent and Essex. They are not indexed, although you may find indexes elsewhere, such as on FamilySearch or Online Parish Clerks. History House - dip into the history of Essex links to digitised images of some parish registers in the Essex Record Office. Registers from the area round the Medway Towns in Kent are on the Medway Archives CityArk site. This is not the most user-friendly site I have ever used, to say the least, but given the choice, I'll take inconvenient but content-rich over pretty but empty every time! For anyone not familiar with the term 'Medway Towns', it is the area round Rochester and Chatham; Chatham includes not only Chatham Royal Naval Dockyard, but is also a garrison town, so it is interesting for anyone with ancestors in the Army, Navy and Royal Marines, who may have been stationed there at some time. The Mid-Kent Marriage Index 1754-1911 is a useful resource for another part of the county.