Six

Sea Charts and Life Maps

I wanted to look at the sea charts of Morecambe Bay and see for myself how the sea bed has changed over the centuries. I arranged to meet one of the curators at Lancaster’s Maritime Museum. The museum is housed in the city’s former Customs House, a grand affair designed by the architect and cabinet-maker Richard Gillow. It’s all imposing Doric columns, porticos and a double flight of stone steps. In its former life it served the 18th-century shipping trade, and as I walked towards it, the only person on the quayside, I imagined the scene 200 years ago, a different kind of skyline made up of timber and sailcloth, of bowsprits and masts, yards and deck rails, all action, sounds and the smell of pitch.

* * *

The earliest record I’d previously found of Morecambe Bay was a map of Lancashire made by the cartographer John Speed in 1610. Although it didn’t focus solely on the bay, it did show three major areas of sandbanks and two channels that were clearly navigable to shipping: the Ulverston and Kent channels. During my phone conservation with the curator ahead of my visit, she’d told me that a sea chart of the bay dating from the 1600s was her favourite item in the museum’s collection.

Michelle came to greet me and took me behind the scenes through alarmed and key-coded doors, then she disappeared into a store-room full of shelves and racks of paintings. She came out again holding two framed charts and placed them side by side on a large table. The earliest was dated 1689; I was relieved that it was behind glass. The second chart was dated 1783. We spent a few minutes looking at them together, comparing and pointing out changes like a child’s ‘spot the difference’ cartoon.

A compass at the centre of the earlier chart sent out radiating lines of directional bearings across the map. North was a small arrow that pointed towards Scotland. The Isle of Man tilted diagonally above the compass, and the coasts of Wales, England and Scotland were arranged precisely around the sides and base as if three sides of a wiggly rectangle. Dumfries and Galloway were reduced to a bumpy line like the outline of a treasure map. Morecambe Bay was placed centrally, just north of the estuaries of the River Mersey and the Ribble, and was the most significant feature on the north-west coast of England. Three engraved galleon-like ships, with their sails a-billow, voyaged across the Irish Sea. They listed to starboard in a strong north-easterly wind, everything made of paper and ink.

Four distinct areas of sandbanks were marked on the chart: Lancaster, Kent, Middle, and Cow Sands. But the most noticeable feature was a navigable channel that wound its way up into the far north-western head of the bay to the small settlement of Green Odd, now Greenodd. It was confirmation, were it needed, that ships regularly sailed up into the furthest reaches of the bay. Down at the north-western edge, the town of Barrow had yet to appear. It didn’t emerge until the iron trade began to develop around 1839. But Lancaster was marked, though still isolated from the sea until its development as a port in 1750.

Both charts brought to my mind the illustrations and maps that Pauline Baynes made for C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, images that held me in thrall for much of my childhood. In both charts the ships that sailed across the paper seas appeared to be caravels, the same smaller, more navigable ships that the Portuguese had also developed to facilitate exploration into the African interior.

The larger chart of 1783 was engraved with artistic flourishes and embellishments that would have been commonplace in its day. Cherubs and gods blew winds across the bay and the contours and outlines of hill ranges were shown as sight-lines, aids to navigation when sailing up the channels towards the north. Michelle handed me a magnifying glass, and through it a world of tiny anchors opened up. The map-maker, Samuel Fearnon, indicated ‘the place proper for Vessels to lie afloat or a Ground’. Depths were marked in fathoms ‘at Low Water in Spring Tides’ – scores of them indicated the routine world of seafarers navigating up the channels towards Ulverston, Greenodd and Milnthorpe.

Although the shipping channels were familiar to sailors, Fearnon acknowledged the inherent dangers of the bay. He wrote, ‘with proper Directions to shun all dangers and sail into any Harbour, Road etc, contained herein... Humbly described by his most obedient servant...’ Further out towards the Irish Sea, depth markers were shown in the place where the white blades of a windfarm now turn. The make-up of the sea bed was described like a user-guide for enthusiasts: ‘Stony Ground, Low Water Ebbs’, ‘Brown Sand and Shells’, ‘Fine Sand’, ‘Brown Sand and Red Shells’, ‘Course Sand and Black Specks’, and further out the more ominous ‘Soft Black Ground’ or ‘Soft Mud’.

The bay’s infamous sandbanks were mapped with much greater detail. An engraved sailing ship sailed through the Furness and South Deeps towards Ulverston and a navigable channel wound its way up the bay to Grange as well. Greenodd had become a significant creek-port for Lancaster, a place from where valuable minerals were carried out to the wider world – copper ore dug out of the Coniston hills, locally quarried limestone, and gunpowder from the nearby settlement of Backbarrow. Incoming goods recorded in historical documents of the time were raw cotton, coal and sugar.

If you go to Greenodd these days there’s a busy dual carriageway that passes alongside the bay for a mile or two. You can mark the state of the tide by driving along, but you’d have little sense that in Fearnon’s day Greenodd was a major shipbuilding centre, a place where vessels of up to 200 tons were built. In 1783 this remote settlement had its own role in the slaving triangle. There is documentation showing that the village was part of an illicit trade in slaves.

Sunderland Point is marked as the main anchorage, or out-port, for Lancaster, the place where everything from sugar, ginger, cotton and tropical woods were offloaded, and also the place where the boy slave, posthumously named Sambo, was put ashore and left to die. Lancaster’s celebrated Georgian architecture and the building I was researching in, all built on the back of slavery, had yet to be planned or begun.

Ulverston Canal had not yet been built, but next to the shore at Bardsea, Sea Wood was marked, once a favourite dog-walking place from my Ulverston days. I went there only a week or so after my visit to the museum. I drove over with my actor friend, Tim. He’d recently moved back to Cumbria after decades in the south, and he wanted to revisit the wood and the shore. They had lodged themselves firmly in his mind, in the way that significant places from childhood do. His mother had died recently, and Tim wanted to see the place where his family had taken him with his two brothers for picnics, and where the boys had climbed and hung from the trees like gibbons.

We walked out of the afternoon light and into the complex darkness under a tree canopy of oak, beech, hornbeam, rowan and ash. We followed the path that meandered through the wood, the bay just a shimmer of light beyond the dense branches and tree trunks. A deep limestone gully ran between our path and the shore, its steep sides preventing us from going out again into the sunlight. Eventually the slope lessened and we dropped out of the wood, emerging beside a bay that was unrecognisable from my Ulverston days.

Where once the limestone pavement had flowed down onto the sands, the changed weather and tide patterns of the past 25 or so years had reversed the process, so that now the sands flowed upwards, consuming and concealing much of the rocky clints and grikes and the pebbly shoreline. Much of it had become buried. The environment seemed to have changed so dramatically that at first Tim couldn’t find the place where he and his brothers had launched themselves from tree branches onto a smooth slab of rock, and slid down the sloping surface onto the shore. We explored the edge of the wood and shore, and eventually Tim’s memories began to coalesce, so that the place did form itself again, coming back from the past. We walked further and he found another location, a place where he’d made a film with his teenage pals; Tim as a gruesome clown made up with face-paint and dealing tarot cards. He’s still got the film.

I was in my early thirties before I moved away from Cumbria. On a cool, late summer evening, just before I headed east, my pals and I sat with Sea Wood at our backs and we waited, talking and no doubt drinking substantial amounts whilst a foil-wrapped salmon cooked over an open fire. It was that time of the year when the season was on the cusp of change, when there are subtle shifts in the atmosphere and one begins to feel a sense of loss for the end of summer. The salmon took forever, but at least we had the bay to look out over. Since then though, forests of bulrushes have colonised the sandy shore and created a barrier between the wood and the open bay. Tim and I saw paths leading into it, places where children might have pushed through, believing it jungle. I heard the unmistakeable tieu, tieu, tieu and trilling of bearded tits. They were invisible in mid-plantation.

We pushed our way inside, and it did indeed become jungle, if only for a minute or two. We couldn’t see the birds although they were calling tantalisingly close to us, and so we thrashed our way back out. As we did we tried to recall lines from The African Queen to quote to each other, but failing, resorted to ‘Well quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ and ‘Well, I don’t give a damn either!’

We walked further to a place free of bulrushes and where the view opened out again. I saw a large wooden board meshed up with weed and rope and grasses up on the high-tide line. Turning it over, there were illustrations and historical details from Cockersands Abbey and its lighthouse 15 miles across the bay, just south of the outfall of the Lune. I guessed that the sign must have become trashed by last winter’s gales and been sent on a journey to the far side of the bay. There was an interpretive map too. ‘You are here,’ it said – and we were, and we weren’t, all at the same time.

As we walked, the light changed. A new sickle moon grew out of the intense blue of the late afternoon sky and hung, limpid, above the bay. The light moved over the sands so that they turned the rough red of earthenware and the pale straw of late August grasses. A small group of people walked out from the shore. As the light flowed over the bay they were lost, found, lost and found again. At Heysham it grew dark and brooding but at Morecambe the buildings were lit by the low sun, as if they glowed from within. In the intimacy of such clear light, distances advanced and receded. We could see windows on the sea-front buildings and vehicles moving along the promenade 15 clear miles across the bay. Massive banks of clouds built white, improbable towers. Just south, amidst the darkening sky, rain fell.

* * *

Michelle unfurled a paper chart dated 1890. I was beginning to feel as if I was on board ship. It showed that the channels to Grange and Ulverston were still open, still navigable. Ulverston Canal had been built a hundred years previously during the 1790s.

By now the River Lune was navigable all the way into the heart of Lancaster, and ships offloaded right outside the museum on the Georgian quayside. A lighthouse had been built at the southern end of Walney Island and another, smaller one out on Cockerham Sands. Both were intended as navigation aids for ships travelling into the River Lune and up to Glasson Dock, built a hundred years earlier.

Hoad Hill was there, along with its 40-year-old replica lighthouse, a monument erected by the townspeople in honour of Ulverston’s most famous son, Sir John Barrow. Born a farm labourer’s son, Barrow navigated a meteoric ascendency to the position of Second Lord of the Admiralty via a clerk’s job in Liverpool, the post of teacher of mathematics in a private school, and postings to the British embassy in China and South Africa, where he was given the complex task of negotiating a sensitive truce between Boer settlers and the native black population. He was a founder of the Royal Geographical Society and held the role of Second Lord of the Admiralty for 40 years. He’s remembered for sending explorers – such as John Ross, James Clark Ross and John Franklin – north to search for the notorious North-West Passage. (In one of those occasional seismic events in the world of archaeology, in September 2014 underwater archaeologists from Parks Canada and the Royal Canadian Navy’s Fleet Atlantic located the wreck of HMS Erebus, the ship of Franklin’s doomed expedition of 1845. The Inuit people had had direct encounters with members of Franklin’s crew. These stories, or facts – for that is what they were – had been preserved within the Inuit oral tradition. Held in memory for 175 years, it was this testimony that proved invaluable to the locating of the ship.)

Barrow Strait in the Canadian Arctic, Point Barrow in Alaska and the city of Barrow in Alaska are all named after Sir John Barrow. As if this were not reward enough, the townspeople of Ulverston decided to build him a lighthouse; a full-scale 100-foot high replica of the Eddystone lighthouse and a landmark that can be seen from many places around the bay and beyond. It’s a unique folly, a lighthouse without a light on a hilltop at the end of the shortest, deepest, straightest canal in the country.

* * *

Michelle brought out the final chart, dated 1964. Just one look and it was clear that the whole bay had silted up. The individual sandbanks were melded together and the navigable channels had disappeared. Hest Bank Wharf had been built and lost again underneath the sands. In 1964, no one yet knew of its existence. Barrow was there alright, along with Vickers Shipyard and the docks where Polaris submarines were built as our first line of defence in the Cold War. My family had moved to Ulverston and my father was working at the shipyard.

At lunchtime and at four o’clock, when the yard whistle blew, a full tide of blue boiler-suited workers rode out of the shipyard gates on bicycles and surged like a wave over Michaelson Bridge and into town; you’d have to watch out if you even thought about crossing the road. The tradesmen and apprentices had a pie and a pint for lunch and then flowed back again inside the yard. Dad didn’t ride a bike to work. He wore a suit and tie and travelled to Barrow by car. (And he didn’t eat pies.)

No one had any idea that the Polaris missiles would stop being aimed at Russia; they would have laughed if you told them that in the shipyard. They’d’ve laughed too if you said that the Berlin Wall, built just three years earlier in 1961, would fall, hacked to pieces in 1989 after radical and tectonic political shifts in the Eastern Bloc. Or that pieces of the wall would be used throughout the world as monolithic, articulate evidence in art exhibitions. The word ‘Taliban’ had not been heard. The War on Terror might have been a story about aliens in an American comic book.

By 1964 the idea of shipping in the inner bay had become a mere historical notion. The canal, a place we were banned from ever swimming (though of course we occasionally did), and where sailing ships had waited at anchor for the fill of the tide, had been reduced to a repository for dead dogs and shopping trolleys, wrecked cars and God knows what else. The canal towpath was now just a place to walk or ride your bike down to the shore and back, passing the towers and processing plant of the drug manufacturer, Glaxo. Some days you could smell the penicillin in the air.

Given my mother’s antipathy towards the bay, we didn’t visit it often. Sometimes, after shopping trips to Barrow, we’d come home by the coast road, and then I saw its vast distances for myself. I could see it from my school’s sixth form building too, and during art lessons I’d look up and sometimes see distant fishermen’s tractors moving over the bay from one location to the next, in search of shrimps or cockles. I watched them heading back inland before the tide came in, and I remember watching its progress, altering the colour of the sands to grey as it moved along at the speed of a galloping horse.

And the hills; you can see them on the sea charts, at the northernmost part of the bay. They started at the top of our road in Ulverston. The road was brand new with plots marked out and houses half or wholly built. Me, my brother and our new friends got to work building dens on empty plots from materials left lying by the builders. From breeze blocks, bricks, wooden planking, sheets of plastic and anything else we could lay our hands on, we conjured a house of our own, using it for the whole of that summer before the builders turned their attention to the last undeveloped space at the top of the hill. In the evenings we lit it with candles that had their own place on a window shelf. If we were quiet enough, it was impossible to tell whether we were at home or not, and so for a while at least we could evade being called in for meals or bed.

We had neighbours, too, in our self-build house, a family of Californians: Captain Rust, his wife and their two boys. A handful of Americans were working in the shipyard at this time, helping the British Royal Navy to develop Polaris missiles, the raison d’être of the Polaris submarine programme.

My brother and I made friends with the Rust boys and when we called for them their mother invited us in. She was untypical of the adults we knew, and was completely unfazed by children. She asked us questions, and what’s more she listened to our answers. She plied us with fresh orange juice poured from cartons that were kept in a huge refrigerator, when all we’d ever had was insipid orange squash. She cooked us waffles and drenched them in maple syrup. She frequently arrived unbidden at the den, calling out to us and handing over huge bowlfuls of home-made salted popcorn. I took to visiting her alone; she was like a magnet to me.

One day I knocked on her door as she was about to go down to the town and I asked if I could go with her, desperate for a ride in her electric blue car.

‘Will your mom be okay with that?’ she asked. I think she realised what my mother’s response would have been as I began to slide, ever so slowly, and ever so low down in the seats as we drove past our house.

* * *

My parents were both complete urbanites. Neither one of them saw the point of walking unless it involved pavements and usually shops. On trips into the countryside we were the archetypal family picnicking at the side of the road, or as near as damn it. Walks were not gone on, explorations did not take place with adults, and holidays were rare. But perhaps then, this is what makes for stronger connections, that you have to work things out for yourself. Without early signage and interpretation, we either choose to seek and see, or not. As the author Rebecca Solnit put it so well about her own parents: ‘They had nothing to teach us about the countryside past the fading of the road, and perhaps the place was more vivid to me ... (a place) where no adults arrived to interpret and regulate.’11 So my brother and I were let loose, along with the other neighbourhood kids, to roam unregulated. We had fields and hills, trees and crags and a path that led uphill to the lighthouse without a light. Below the monument, on the face of Hoad Hill, there was a geological arrangement of stone slabs known as the Devil’s Armchair. Commit a terrible deed and he’d push you over the edge with the point at the end of his tail. There was a stone gully above the largest rock face, and with our feet in this and our heads leaning over the edge we would peer down the slab where, a hundred feet below, loose rocks and the grassy slope resumed.

On summer Sundays, the folly – or Hoad Monument, to give its proper name – opened to the public and for a small amount of money you could climb the internal staircase to the top. There was just an iron handrail to hold and increasingly narrow steps to walk up, and at the top an airy platform accessed through a hatch. Only four or so people could fit at the top at once. Up there, we looked out through the open arches where, had this been a real lighthouse, the light and mirrors would have been. There was no protective glazing then, but no one ever fell to their death. With the wind whipping my hair into my eyes I looked out over the vast expanse of Morecambe Bay. I could see the length and the breadth of it; understand the scale of it. Then turn around and see the Lake District mountains ranged before me. And these landscapes, they called to me in a way that although I wasn’t yet able to articulate, I felt the pull of them all.

I began to investigate maps of the Lake District, reading them as if they were books, pouring over details, exploring them in depth on wet days at home. I began to conjure stories around some of the place names that I found. The Old Man of Coniston, The Lion and the Lamb, Helm Crag, Armboth Fell, Bethecar Moor, Wetherlam, Hardknott Pass, Crinkle Crags. Going out to explore these places years later, either alone or with friends, I had to take stock, to allow them to be how they really were, along with the way I’d dreamed them up for myself; two different versions of the same reality.

* * *

By now my world had expanded. I walked, frequently borrowing a neighbour’s dog, a beagle that seemed impossible to tire out. Up into the hills we’d go. Passing through a field one day I found a vixen and her cubs playing in the long grass of summer. We sat quietly together, the beagle and me, his nose twitching, finding the heady scent of fox carried on the air. The cubs were just a few weeks old; they hadn’t yet developed the fox’s red coat and were smoky-grey in colour. Eventually the vixen led the cubs back into the den in the banking underneath a hedge. I was transfixed. That this had happened so close to where I lived.

During one of the first summers in our new home, a pair of house martins chose to make it their home too. I watched as they constructed the nest under the eaves and above our front porch. Then the chicks came and I watched again as the parent birds swooped in and out, up and down to the fields and hills that surrounded us. Returning home from any trip out, my first thought was to look up, and though I was young, maybe nine or ten, I felt that the birds nesting on our house were a small piece of magic; they’d chosen us above any of the other houses. And I knew they would return year after year.

As the summer wore on, a neat pile of droppings formed itself on the edge of the front step up to the house. It didn’t ever occur to me that this was a problem, but just a fact of life. Then I came home one afternoon to find my father up a ladder, knocking the nest down with the end of a broom handle. I was speechless. His face wore an expression that told me he knew what those birds meant to me.

‘Well, the chicks have gone now. They’ve flown the nest. Your mother doesn’t want them coming back again – all this mess to clear up.’ He indicated the pile of droppings. A chasm had opened up between us. I’m not sure that it ever fully closed again.

* * *

Later, in the 1970s, the shipyard had a new wave of foreign partners. Warships were being fitted out for the Argentinian navy. My mum and dad became friends with a group of the Argentinians and their wives. They came to our house for supper and my parents went to theirs and together they went to pubs to listen to Trad Jazz, or as me and my musician pals later called it, ‘shipwreck music’ (every man for himself). In just another few years, Argentinian ships and ours were blowing each other sky high out of the South Atlantic Ocean in the Falklands War.