Eleven

Testing the Sands

On that day, after weeks of mild weather and hardly any rain, the Kent looked nothing like a river. How different its character from the clear, voluble stretches of it that tumbled and splashed down from the Kentmere hills, passing through the valley and woods and close to our house in Kendal. It was the same element and there the comparison stopped. The river was wide and glossy, more a shallow, sky-reflecting lake than a flowing body of water as it arced towards the south on a lazy journey, passing Silverdale, Carnforth and Morecambe. The tractor pulled up at the river’s edge and we climbed down, then rolled our trouser legs high. Barry handed us each a sturdy wooden stick and each of us carried a bundle of brobs (or marker sticks), hoisting them onto our shoulders. I left my brand new camera in the trailer. Andy was made of sterner stuff and took his along.

The men analysed the condition of the river, and from their talk it was as if it was a living being to them.

‘A wind from the north-west like today pushes the river slow and wide,’ Cedric said, ‘but a big wind and heavy rain makes it cut a direct path, and it’ll move at speed – much deeper too.’

I’ve spent significant periods of time walking alone in the mountains. I’ve been lost and disorientated in mists, but this was something new, this sense of flat space where distances are difficult. We were about four miles out on the bay, halfway between Humphrey Head and White Creek at Arnside. I wasn’t alone and of course I couldn’t have been in safer hands, but there was something about this landscape and our remoteness from land that made me uneasy; it was a new sensation for me.

Cedric climbed back in the tractor, shouting as he did, ‘I don’t like this bloody tractor one bit. I don’t trust it either.’ And he drove away, leaving the three of us behind in the middle of that expanse of sand.

* * *

I’d planned an early morning rendezvous with Cedric Robinson, the nation’s only Queen’s Guide to the Sands. We’d talked on the phone the evening before, and I found him still giddy, fizzing even, from having lunch that day with the Queen and Princess Anne on their official visit to South Cumbria.

‘We were asked to go into the dining room and find our place names. Well, I found two! One next to Princess Anne, and the other next to the Queen. So I went to find a steward and I told him, and do you know what he said? He said, “Well, Cedric, it looks as if you will just have to choose for yourself who you sit next to.”

‘So,’ he said, ‘I chose Princess Anne. And she was absolutely lovely, and do you know she was a very good conversationalist.’

I told him he’s a great one for hobnobbing with royalty.

Cedric’s status in the Morecambe Bay area is legendary. He’s been Queen’s Guide to the Sands for more than 50 years and his knowledge of the tides and the rivers that shift their route through the sands – sometimes by a mile or more in one night – is unsurpassed. In his 80s, he has the physique of a man half his age; he’s tall, tanned, (or weathered), big- chested and upright, a man in his element and comfortable in his own skin.

Cedric was going out to test the sands and the state of the River Kent ahead of two crossings later that week, one for a group of horse and carriage enthusiasts and then a weekend cross-bay walk. Any crossing depends on the weather, but more than that on the amount of rain that’s fallen on higher ground. In a bad summer like the previous four or five, more walks are cancelled than take place.

We planned to meet at Humphrey Head, a limestone outcrop projecting into the bay from the low-lying fields of the Cartmel peninsula.

* * *

Early the next morning I drove to Humphrey Head. Rounding a bend in the narrow lane a leveret was sitting mid-road, warming itself in the sun. It moved off distractedly, lolloping ahead with black-tipped, pale-edged ears acting like vertical radar, switching direction continuously. Articulating its powerful hind legs slowly, it began to jig from side to side like a wind-up toy – all eyes, ears and legs – and then disappeared under the shelter of a hawthorn hedge.

In the small car park underneath the cliff the quality of silence was immediate; a rare moment. The engine ticked as it cooled and a wren chit-chitted in amongst young hazel and hawthorn on the cliff face, otherwise all was utterly still. Poking above the marsh grass to the south-west, the turbines of Walney Windfarm were illuminated by the low sun, glimmering like a row of distant candles. A woodpecker called from the scrub close by. I could see Hoad Monument, the hilltop lighthouse folly at Ulverston, standing out from the shadowed hills behind it. I’d learned the word ‘glas’ from the Welsh poet Gillian Clarke, a potent word for the particular blue-green of hills. There it was, defining the white monument, the glas of Kirby Moor.

Standing beside Humphrey Head there’s an illusion that the surface of the bay slopes upwards, rising higher than the land around it. It’s a trick of the light and the land and the vast, flat distances. Towards Flookburgh I noticed a puff of smoke drifting upwards from way out on the edge of the marsh grass, and at first I thought it a cloud of birds rising up into the air. Seconds later, a mechanical hum came travelling over the distance, and the silhouettes of three tractors appeared. They were putting out faint diesel plumes into the air as they ticked along the grassy horizon like miniscule automata.

Time passed and Cedric hadn’t arrived. I thought it unlikely that he’d be late. The minutes ticked on, turning into a quarter then half an hour, and two more tractors followed the others out onto the bay. I phoned Cedric’s home; his wife, Olive, answered.

‘Hi, Olive, I’ve arranged to meet Cedric at Humphrey Head at nine o’clock. I’m wondering if I’ve missed him.’
‘Oh no, don’t worry. He only left home 10 minutes ago.’

I sat down to wait, taking in the cliff face and its windblown swathe of yew, whitebeam, hazel and rowan.

In the distance a train racketed along the line into Furness. A car arrived. Two women climbed out and a young girl wearing pink taffeta and wellies. They moved slightly away from the cliff then stood looking up at it through binoculars. A crow passed over and, as I watched its shadow, I heard the burr and hum of a distant tractor, the sound passing in and out of hearing as it drew closer.

Forty-five minutes after our agreed meeting time, a spindly, aged tractor bounced into view with Cedric at the driver’s seat, pulling an eccentric-looking jalopy, part Child Catcher’s wagon from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and part ancient farm wagon. It was all patched plywood and weather-blasted Perspex.

‘Sorry we’re late,’ Cedric said. ‘I had to borrow a tractor. Mine’s gone in for a service.’

I told him not to worry, and climbed up into the trailer where his two helpers, Andy and Barry, sat on a row of back-to-back benches. The floor was strewn with laurel branches. We set off. Within seconds, Cedric stopped the tractor and was down on the ground checking the best route across a deep gully, and then again a second time. With a large shovel he dug out a smoother path, but we still held on tight as the tractor and trailer plunged into and out of each gully, bucking and bouncing before reaching smoother ground.

I looked up above the cliffs of Humphrey Head and saw there, swivelling on the air, a peregrine. It folded its wings, dropped a distance, then rose up again on the morning thermals. So that’s what the family had come to see.

‘They’re doing well here,’ Barry said. ‘The young have fledged; we saw them a few weeks back.’

Travelling out onto the bay there was a new sightline of the headland. The rocks rose out of the sand, then continued upwards in folded waves of limestone. With a row of fenceposts like tiny spines along the ridge, it reminded me of a sea creature emerging out of, or plunging underneath, the bay.

The tide had been out for hours but a layer of water remained like a second skin over the sands and in places there were deeper pockets and shallow lakes of standing water. The trailer rode into and out of channels like a ship ploughing the ocean. In the lee of the headland, a solitary egret stood white and motionless, like marble. Further out, the surface of the sands changed and became smoother. We made a wide curving entrance to the bay.

Another shift in terrain and the trailer began to bounce up and down. We held on to the seats again, passing small cliff edges that had formed and collapsed again as big waves had washed against them. Then came an area where the sands had formed into mounds that were like the moraine of a retreating glacier.

‘I call this the Somme,’ Barry said. ‘These mounds come from the weight of the tide passing over areas of softer or more compressed sand.’

I saw cockles heaped up within the mounds, their edges semi-exposed like treasure.

‘The past few cold winters have finished them off. They’re mostly dead, no good to anyone,’ Barry said. The beds had been closed since the cockling disaster in 2004; the echoes keep travelling.

The surface changed again and we moved on over a skin of perfectly becalmed water that reflected the sky, so that as I looked down we drove over intense cobalt-blue and cumulus cloud streets. The tyre marks fractured the surface, distances elided and light spooled on the sinuous ground like heavy white blossom. I remarked on the way the surface changes from one area to the next and Andy said, ‘It does, all the time; every day sometimes. Over at Arnside the sands are as smooth as glass-paper just now.’

The guides have used laurel branches for centuries for marking the safe crossing routes over the sands. Their thick leaves stay on the branches even when submerged daily by the tide. They’re known as ‘brobs’. They’re there in Turner’s paintings of the bay. We drove past brobs that had been put in position on previous visits. From a distance they resembled people who had somehow been left behind, lone figures adrift on the empty bay.

‘That one – the one all on its own – we call it the “man brob”,’ Barry said, as if he’d read my mind.

* * *

The three of us were standing at the edge of the river in the middle of the bay. Further downstream, where Cedric had stopped the tractor, I watched as he wandered, looking, stopping, and setting new brobs. I began to wonder what time the tide was due in and how long we would be out there.

A helicopter droned in from the east and swung in closer to have a look at us. Resisting the temptation to wave, I wondered what the people inside thought of us, standing at the edge of a river in the middle of the bay, miles away from land.

Barry and I paddled into the river. Andy was already midway across and taking photographs. The waters changed gradually from shallow and clear to grainy and textured, coming up above our knees. I stopped to hoist my trousers higher, then, taking slow steps in the cloudy water, I let out a cry of surprise.

‘What’s up?’ Barry asked.

‘A fluke!’ I said. ‘I stood on a fluke.’

The squirming sensation had caught me unawares; I’d trodden on a fluke, the flat-fish commonly found in Morecambe Bay.

‘Last time that happened I was just a kid. My pal’s dad took us out to tread for them, but I didn’t fancy the idea of standing on any.’

The traditional way of catching flukes is to feel for them with the feet, then reach in and under the water to pick out the fish before it has a chance to wriggle away.

A moment later there was the distinctive bounce of a fish on my leg, but I was OK; I was orientated. I wondered what, if anything, the fish thought about it.

Twice in the crossing Barry stopped to test the flow rate with his low-tech device: he simply watched the speed of the water pushing past his stick. We waded further and after some minutes came to the other side, throwing the brobs down in a heap. Andy arrived alongside us, and working together, the two of them began setting the brobs into place. Andy pushed and wound his stick far down into the mud.

‘Ready?’ he said, then pulled out the stick as Barry pushed a brob down into the loosened sand, securing it as the mud and water closed the hole again.

Over our heads a small group of young gulls came winging in. They flew as if intoxicated, directionless, mob-handed, adolescent, their cries argumentative against the complete silence of the bay. I watched as they flittered down onto the sands and joined a long line of birds that had settled in to feed on the surface a distance away. Looking through the binoculars, I saw that there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of oystercatchers. I’d never seen so many in one place before. Stitched in amongst the oystercatchers were countless gulls. Out there on the bay, it was the undisputed kingdom of birds.

I’d visited Cedric at home on a freezing February afternoon as a grey and pink mackerel-backed sky spread over the whole bay. Sitting in front of the banked-up fire at Guide’s Cottage, my cheeks growing hotter by the minute, he’d told me his name for oystercatchers.

‘I call them “sea-pie”. They’re wonderful birds. I’ve watched them riding the bow wave when the bore comes in. Fifty years ago the bore was a very different kind of a beast. You could hear it coming a mile off, with a three-foot standing wave at the front and sea-pie skimming the top of it. What a sight that was.’

Cedric drove back towards us. He climbed down and left the engine sputtering. ‘It’s changed its course again… do you think?’ he called across the river. Barry and Andy shouted agreement. ‘Significantly. Moved about half a mile, I think.’

‘What’s that sticking out of the water? Is it a bird?’ Cedric asked.

‘I’ll go and have a look,’ Andy said, and began walking downriver towards a dark object at the river’s edge. It didn’t fly away.

‘It’s a brob alright,’ he shouted back to us. He pulled it out and reset it on the river-bank.

‘We set them in pairs,’ Barry said as we watched. ‘They’re like channel markers for shipping, so it’s clear where to cross the river.’

* * *

A dark rain cloud came close, pushed along by the westerly wind. We wondered if it would release its load onto us as we felt the first large splots of rain. But it skimmed past and headed Morecambe way. As it moved, it grew darker and minutes later bands of heavy rain fell from it. I could imagine families on the imported sand beaches at Morecambe stuffing towels into bags and rushing off to the cafés until it passed.

Cedric came wading back across the river towards us, singing at the top of his voice. If Cedric formed a religion, I might be tempted to follow.

With the four of us together again, Cedric marked the time and the men made calculations about the tide times for the coming days. It’s crucial, of course, to get it right. That’s part of the reason the men were there: not just to test the riverbed for quicksand and mark safe crossings away from it, but also to mark the time and to know when to be back on dry land again. It was eleven-thirty. In another four hours the place we stood would be submerged beneath 10 metres of water.

* * *

Barry’s a blow-in of 11 years from Manchester and he wanted to know the names of the mountains that framed the view at the back of the bay. I named them for him.

‘That’s Fairfield, Red Screes, then the gap of Kirkstone Pass, then Caudale Moor and the hills of Kentmere; Froswick, Ill Bell and Yolk.’

Cedric walked past us and said, ‘I’ve never heard of any of them.’

I wondered if he was having a joke. But maybe not; after all, the bay is his territory – he’s on intimate terms with 120 square miles of tidal estuary.

I said, ‘I like the fact that you can see the source of this river, the mountains of Kentmere, just there.’

Cedric pointed to a wide bend in the river a distance away. ‘See the way light sparkles on that stretch of water? That shows the river’s moving much faster down there.’ And I did, but a question formed, of how Cedric could be replaced. You can’t archive this stuff, or create websites for it. You can’t communicate about this place by email.

* * *

Andy and Barry continued setting brobs. Cedric and I began to wade back across the river towards the idling tractor and we talked about the continuation of the over-sands route that crosses between Flookburgh and Ulverston. It involves the crossing of two more rivers, the Leven and the Crake. We’d stopped to talk mid-river, and I found that my unease and that sense of unfamiliarity had all evaporated, moved away like the dark cloud, and all the while the river pushed on, pressing gently against our legs.

Oystercatchers slung past us in arrowhead formation. Nodding in their direction of travel, Cedric said, ‘We’ll head over to that bank for our coffee.’ I couldn’t see a bank, but I knew that the bay was anything but flat. More pictures came to me from the winter’s afternoon by Cedric’s fire.

‘There are banks and gullies out there; great holes big enough to swallow a tractor, a double-decker bus even. We’d go night fishing with tractors, depending on the state of the tides, fishing for shrimps. One night we were driving along in the moonlight and all of a sudden matey on my right disappeared, tractor and all. He’d gone straight into a massive gully. A ‘melgrave’, we call these big holes. Anyway, he managed to climb out alright but the tractor was another story. We never saw it again.’

He described too how, after yet another episode of the unnervingly heavy rains that we’ve had over these past few years, he’d gone out to assess the state of the river. He said he’d been left almost without speech, and that’s something.

‘The river had cut a new channel overnight, six miles away from its previous course.’ He described the river that day as ‘like a roaring sea’.

* * *

The tang of coffee filled the trailer and Cedric held court, giving us tale after tale. His is a rich, deep seam of powerful memories, and he offered them to us with generosity, for our entertainment and I thought, for himself, for the vigour of remembering.

‘I’d gone out shrimping at night with our Jean. She was about 12 then, I think. It was as clear as a bell when we set off; the stars were all out, and the moon, and you could see the lights of all the villages around the bay. It was a good night for navigation. We were miles out, and busy with the fishing, then when we came to go home I looked up and the fog had rolled in. We couldn’t see a thing. Well, that night I navigated home by listening for the sound of the river. That did the trick. Anyway, we lived to tell the tale.’

* * *

Immense cumulus clouds streets had continued to form around the edge of the bay. They built height over the land, leaving the sky above the bay a clear and potent blue. I’ve seen this so often, the sky clearing, as if putting itself in order, ready for the approach of the tide. As we set off for Humphrey Head again, the headland appeared like a wave swelling out of the sands, and in the distance Peel Castle shimmered above translucent air. In the heat haze the hills of Furness were breaking up into segments that moved and danced.

On the journey back to land we passed close to the ‘man brob’, and as we drove past Barry said, ‘A few weeks ago we came out and I could see something odd about the shape of it. As we got closer, it took off. It was a peregrine. He’d been sitting there in splendid isolation until we came along.’

We were back, rolling over the saltmarsh and bumping into and out of the two gullies. Underneath the limestone cliffs, I climbed down. We said our farewells and the tractor disappeared up the lane. I listened as the hum of its engine faded off into the countryside until all was quiet again. I had a sense that those hours out on the bay would stay with me for a long time, glimmering like the river as it moved by degrees further and further into the distance.