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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2009
On the whole global surface of land and sea it falls to the lot of some few places to emerge through time to be of immense importance. Lizard Point is just one such place. Who were the first mariners to realize that it was the most southerly point of the English mainland or to use it for landfall and for caping, we shall probably never know. What is clear, however, is that, by the time Claudius Ptolemy was compiling his Guide to Geography, C. AD 160, it was sufficiently well known to the Roman world for the name by which it was then called, Damnonium or Ocrinum Promontorium, to be included, with its geographical coordinates, in his famous gazetteer. It is of academic interest only for us to query whether those coordinate values were right or wrong, whether they were a good approximation or not: what is important for us, with the benefit of very long hindsight, is to marvel at the sheer brilliance of the conception of a spherical coordinate system, and at the industry and far-sightedness of one or more men who set about compiling lists of known places with assigned coordinates. What, in so doing, they handed down to posterity is of inestimable value.
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