Porthcurno cable station

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A small valley on the south-west tip of Cornwall which, for most of a century, was the busiest cable landing point on Earth. Cables came ashore across the beach here from 1870, when the line to Bombay was completed, and Porthcurno grew into the hub of the Eastern Telegraph Company and later Cable & Wireless: a training college, a repeater and testing station, and at its height a fan of cables reaching Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt, India, the Cape, Australia and the Americas. During the Second World War the instrument rooms were moved into tunnels cut into the hillside. The site is now the Museum of Global Communications and holds the archive of the companies that built the network. Porthcurno is in this Journey for a reason that has nothing to do with nostalgia: the reasons a cable was landed here — a sheltered sandy beach with no rock to chafe the shore end, a steep clean approach, and a landowner and government willing to permit it — are the same categories of reason that decide where a cable lands today, which is why the modern map is so recognisably descended from the Victorian one.