The Valentia Island cable station

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The European end of the first transatlantic telegraph cables, on an island off the coast of County Kerry in the south-west of Ireland. The 1858 cable was landed here; so, after the failures of 1857, 1858 and 1865, was the successful cable of 1866, from Foilhommerum Bay, and Valentia went on to work as a cable station for just over a century. The geography is the argument. Valentia is the westernmost convenient landfall in Europe with a sheltered harbour and a short, steep shelf, which makes the ocean crossing as short as the Atlantic allows and puts the fragile shore end in as little bad water as possible; the corresponding point on the other side is the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, for the same reasons in reverse. Ireland and Canada have jointly proposed the transatlantic cable stations at Valentia and Heart's Content for World Heritage inscription, and the sites remain on a tentative list rather than inscribed. A reader who wants one image for this whole Journey can take this one: two rocky headlands, chosen in the 1850s because they were the closest two useful pieces of land across an ocean, still doing the same job.