In 2004, on a freezing cold February night, 24 Chinese men and women were cut off by a fast-moving incoming tide and lost their lives; suddenly, horribly, Morecambe Bay was firmly on the global map. Images of the bay and stories of its inherent dangers were beamed across the world, catapulted via predictably ghoulish media stories into the sitting rooms of people who had never heard of the place. Through this single incident, the wider world knew what those of us who grow up near the bay have known for our entire lives: it is a place of inherent danger. In certain locations, even to venture more than a metre or two from the shore can lead to difficulties: the rapid ebb and flow of the tides, the shifting sands, the quicksands and the channels that regularly alter their course are understood by just a small and shrinking breed of men who fish out on the bay, or who carry on the ancient tradition of guiding people across the sands. There is an irony then, that the most recognised part of Morecambe Bay is in reality its least knowable.
When I did venture out – far out into the middle of the bay with Cedric Robinson, the Queen’s Guide to the Sands – I found it a landscape that was at once unnerving, unsettling and incredible. On a day with high cumulus clouds and infinite blue space above reflected in the skin of water left behind by the tide, and in the shallows of the River Kent, I saw a strange wilderness of unfamiliar, beguiling beauty.
But what of the bay’s edgelands?
Almost 60 miles of coastline circumnavigate Morecambe Bay. Although I was aware of many places on the perimeter, through the osmosis of having lived for years close to the bay, there were others I had neither visited nor knew of. Collectively these had long been eclipsed not only by the footprint, or idea of the bay itself, but also by another adjacent star-turn – the Lake District. And even though I loved the mountains and valleys, I knew that there were places around the bay that possessed their own understated qualities. It seemed high time their story was told too. The collective feelings of despondency and responsibility that many local people felt following the disaster of 2004 rumbled on for years. Over time though, I began to build a picture of how else the bay might be seen.
So I planned a neat end-to-end affair, a sequential set of walks around the edgelands of the bay bookended by the beginnings of one New Year and the last of the old. On an early January morning I set out to walk to Sunderland Point, where the River Lune flows out to meet the Irish Sea. Some maps show Knott End and the broad outfall of the River Wyre as the southern extremity of the bay, but I drew my own border at the Lune.
Mostly I walked alone, though on a small number of days I took along a companion; once a friend from school days I hadn’t seen for 30 years. Both of us found more than we’d anticipated that day. Memories came flooding back as we walked. We’d stop to look, to reconnoitre the place as its ecology had shifted significantly in the intervening years. We’d both lost close family; lives had moved on.
At times on the journey around the bay that reconnoitring of the past became a job that needed to be done in its own right. So in a sense I found myself making an unwitting pilgrimage through the past as well as the present. Memories, and the feelings that they invoke, are at their strongest, possessing the deepest resonance, when they come unbidden, unlooked for. On they came, washed in by the bay, through the landscape, the light, through encounter, and they even came delivered through the portals of ancient sea charts and the contours of contemporary maps. On one significant day, they flew in on the small, white wings of a particular bird at the liminal space between the sea and the land.
Of course, the planned, tidy, year-long journey didn’t happen. During the first year of writing I was spending large amounts of time away from home. Life got in the way. But the walking and the collecting of stories continued. Alongside the days spent observing landscape, were meetings with people whose deep understanding opened up new seams of knowledge for me. I found evidence of ancient roadways buried underneath the peat, of caves where wolves and lynx once fed, and a ghost in the grass in a country churchyard beside the sea. Like life itself, some of the best moments I spent observing and researching revealed incidents that were not, and could not have been planned.
Karen Lloyd
August 2015