An ocean pool at the rocky tip of Cape Finisterre, long considered the westernmost edge of the world.

By Matthew Bradman

The feathery texture of bright wild fennel yields to pricking gorse as I pick my way downwards between boulders. I snap off one last aniseedy sprig of a plant that has flavoured these few hundred miles, and it will be a comfort to the end. The track steepens its zigzag between serrated granite blocks to a grassy ledge where it falters, abandons the will to push on, and disperses. Leaning out to route-spot my way down, I watch the arête take a sawtoothed plunge into a shifting slab of ocean.

Legend tells that long before the Spanish Camino was Christianised, pilgrims and seekers followed the setting sun along ancient trade routes, walking ever westward until they ran out of land. Indeed, the ruins of a bleak little hermitage lie around a carved rock, the likely site of a solar temple, on the final hilltop. Here at world’s end – Finis Terrae – you would burn your tired old clothes and follow the sun’s shining example, diving naked into the Atlantic Ocean, to die and be reborn… So the story goes. Today’s sacrifice, a ritualised leaving of something important at the end of the way, that is still true. Personal mementos dissolve under the Galician rain, clothing and cheap jewellery, photographs of exes and the dead weighted under stones against that incessant tugging wind. The local council collects threadbare boots and tired ponchos from around a large granite cross on the clifftop; some eager soul has even tried to burn their gear, leaving scorched plastic medusas welded to the rock. Compromised by modernity, I merely outsourced, feeding a pair of disgusting socks to the municipal fires of the final litterbin. So far, so holey. But a swim? Here?