Four

Things that Were Buried Come Out Again Into the Light

I’m paddling in the sea looking down through clear, shallow water at the sand, and I’m trying to work out why this isn’t the real sea, and why it isn’t the real sand either. It looks like sand, and it feels the same as any sand I’ve ever walked on before. Just back there on the grass bank Mum and Dad are sitting in deckchairs, using the car as a windbreak. Dad’s wearing a white shirt and tie, formal as ever, even on holiday, and reading the Daily Mail. Every now and then he reads something aloud to Mum. She’s like Grace Kelly transported to the Lancashire seaside: dark, wing-tipped sunglasses, lipstick, cigarette held aloft between her fingers and a silk headscarf tied under her chin to keep the breeze away.

I’d gone to walk the shore at Hest Bank. When I’d arrived and looked at the setting and the backdrop of the bay, this memory of being in the exact same place came to me. I must have been seven or eight years old. I remembered crossing the railway line at the level crossing and being suddenly there, beside the sea. Once we’d moved to Furness my mother reminded me frequently that the sea of Morecambe Bay wasn’t the real sea, and the sand wasn’t the real sand either. She’d found our move to the small market town of Ulverston difficult; to her it was a place, as she so frequently put it, at the end of the longest road to nowhere. But Dad had been unemployed for months. He’d worked on the doomed TSR2 fighter and reconnaissance jet at Warton, near Blackpool, and we were living in Cleveleys, just a stone’s throw away from what my mother considered to be the real sea.

The TSR2 project was beset by problems and in 1965 the newly-elected Labour government scrapped it, leaving 1,700 workers unemployed overnight. My father was one of them. He spent months looking for work, and was eventually offered a job at Vickers Shipyard in Barrow; a move was inevitable. When Dad began his new job there were months – I don’t remember how many – of staying in lodgings and searching for a house. It must have been through the winter as I recall waiting, looking from the window for the sweep of headlights turning into the road. Then the rush of cold as the door finally opened and in the hallway my father charmed small bags of chocolate coins from his coat pockets for my brother and me.

There was a night before we left for Cumbria when Dad took me out into the dark in the back garden. We waited, I can’t remember for how long. Dad kept his plan to himself. He must have thought it a moment that any seven-year-old daughter should see. As we waited, he pointed out the Milky Way, the Plough, Orion and showed me how to find the North Star.

Then something came gliding across the northern dark, but it didn’t fizzle out like a shooting star.

‘There it is! Can you see it?’ Dad said, his arm reaching skywards, following the object through space.

And I did. Telstar, the first transatlantic satellite moving on a pre-ordained trajectory and passing above our house like a prophecy that life would never be the same again.

It seems, then, that I have Harold Wilson to thank for my connection with Morecambe Bay and with wild places. But the place where I found my mountain feet was a place my mother was never able to settle. She pined for our house near, what was to her, the real sea and the beach made of real sand. She missed the simple, immutable coming in and going out of the tide, the real waves that my brother and I could splash about in wearing inflated plastic swimming rings around our middles, pretending we knew how to swim. She wanted nothing more than to take the tram and rattle and spark along the coast to Blackpool Central and the shops. She longed for the prom and the rock shops with striped awnings that flapped and snapped in the sea wind, the rusty red tower, the fish and chips, the buckets and spades, and the donkeys. She loved the salty, seaside gaudiness of it all.

The pictures and memories took a moment to clear, falling away more slowly than they had arrived.

* * *

It was April, and one of the first warm days of the year. I bought coffee at the beach café and sat outside where people leaned back in their seats enjoying the air and the view with tea served in china cups. Under the tables next to me two Labradors lay flat to the ground, one brown, one black. They eyed each other up, nose six inches from nose. There was a notice in the café window for a dog lost a year ago over the bay at Bardsea, last seen running after a gull and heading across the sands towards Flookburgh. I wondered if he was ever found, or ever caught his gull.

Ulverston was just there across the bay. It seemed so close in the soft spring light, its houses rising up the hillsides and the lighthouse that isn’t a lighthouse on top of Hoad Hill. Recently restored, it stood out from the unfurling hills and backdrop of mountains in its new white paint.

On the empty bay cumulus shadows of charcoal grey migrated slowly across the sands. Where Morecambe Bay and the Irish Sea met, a white sail effervesced through haze and three small spheres of cloud rode the pale turquoise sky. Above my head the colour intensified into the promise of summer cobalt. At the bay’s most westerly point the castle on Piel lsland rose through the shimmer line as though drawn by hand, a series of short pencil marks that sputtered out to a line of scribble.

The warning siren for the automated crossing sounded and when the gates clanged shut a few seconds later a train blasted past heading north. Another memory: my brother and me up on the footbridge, holding onto the wrought iron railings as a train rumbled underneath, becoming momentarily lost to each other in clouds of steam that surprised me; I’d imagined they would be soft, billowy and cool, not acrid enough to take your breath away.

I finished my coffee and walked up onto the bridge. Take your kids up there now and they won’t even be able to see the trains. It’s been boxed in with sheets of corrugated green metal higher than a tall adult’s head.

I walked onto the foreshore and found deep deposits of cockle shells, the ground a silty mix of broken shells and mud, saltmarsh and pools of water left by the tide. For a moment I was surprised. I was so used to these liminal places being the usual mix of estuarine mud, sand and saltmarsh. But a moment later I made the connection. Hest Bank and Red Bank, just further up the coast, were both places where the unregulated gangs had come to raid the ‘Black Gold’ of Morecambe Bay’s cockle beds. A fisherman told me later that there had been burger vans, mobile loos, refrigerated lorries, a whole unofficial infrastructure to support the new, non-local cockling economy. After the beds had finally been decimated years after the cockling disaster of 2004, the profiteers vanished like ghosts in the night, leaving behind a mess that cost the council tens of thousands of pounds to clear away.

The shadow of a gull glimmered across the sea-pools in the saltmarsh, and transparent shrimp darted for cover from mine. A narrow channel of water wound from the shore into the bay, moving onwards in lazy curves. A distance out, there was a man walking two dogs on the sands, one black and one that should have been white, but had four black legs and a tideline of black up to its underbelly. They were walking around what looked like the remains of a groin system. It was a structure built of huge, dressed sandstone blocks and with broken stumps of sea-blackened timbers rising from it. I found an interpretation board close by. The structure was the re-exposed remains of Hest Bank Wharf, uncovered by a series of high tides in 2001. At certain places retreating glaciers dumped their loads of boulders on the bed of the bay, creating raised areas known as skeers. The wharf builders took advantage of this glacial load carrying, building an offshore harbour close to the shore. This gave a point of access to shipping that was near to the Lancaster Canal, a few minutes uphill by horse and cart.

The wharf had been completely buried by the sands, lost to generations before becoming re-exposed again. I liked this idea, of how the tide creates surprises, taking things away and then giving them back at some future moment, re-inventing, or re-interpreting the past for us.

But of course these finds thrown up by the sea are not always glamorous or archaeologically important. Walking along a wild, four-mile Atlantic strand in southern Ireland recently, my son and his pal came upon something buried in the sand, and called me over. We peered down at a black, partly-revealed electronic gizmo, and began digging away with our hands to get at whatever it was. As we scooped, we began to reveal white fabric. Convinced that we’d chanced upon a high-tech weather balloon, or a piece of scientific hardware, we dug away. A few minutes later, as more of the fabric was revealed, my son’s pal sat back on his heels and announced his verdict: ‘It’s an air-bag.’ And so, we admitted reluctantly, it was. Our expectation of the romantic, the curious, the exotic, was reduced to the mundane. Someone had trashed a car on the beach and here, buried and revealed again, was one of its scattered, constituent parts.

* * *

I love the idea of fully-rigged sailing ships coming up into the bay. The way the channels and the whole floor of the bay have silted up though, the most you see these days are small weekender sailing boats, and not that many of them.

In the way of these things, I’d found a piece of evidence of shipping in the bay in the most unlikely of places. I’d been to visit my father in his nursing home in Lancashire. He’d had to move bedrooms closer to where staff could keep a better eye; he’d been falling more frequently. During the move, it seemed the staff had thrown Dad’s possessions back into the drawers, so that personal papers, belts, pyjamas, newspaper cuttings, hearing aid batteries, Christmas cards and more had been stuffed together. I was sifting through, making sense and order, putting things back properly and making piles to keep and piles to chuck out.

Then there it was: a black and white photograph of a sailing ship far up into the northernmost reaches of the bay, berthed in Ulverston Canal, a two-masted schooner with her sails furled and a lighter held fast by ropes at her side. Her prow pointed eloquently towards the bay, speaking of the next voyage out. In the background, and at the end of the canal was Hoad Hill and the lighthouse without a light upon its summit, both significant places for much of my childhood. The photograph came to light – unearthed, if you like – in much the same way as Hest Bank Wharf, after being buried for years. But my dad wasn’t known for his interest in local history.

‘How did you find this, Dad?’

I handed him the photograph. He took it with his curled-over fingers and after a moment or two of peering at it, he’d registered the image.

There was a ‘ha’ of recognition, and then, ‘One of my pals from the U3A found it. He knew I’d lived in Ulverston; thought I’d like it as a memento.’

‘It’s wonderful, Dad, a really great bit of history.’ He nodded and offered it back to me. I turned it over.

The photograph was very old, and had been attached to someone’s photograph album. Instead of the name of the ship or of the photographer, there was just ancient yellowed glue smeared and dried on the back.

‘Can I keep it?’ I asked, and he told me, ‘Of course you can.’

Back home again I began to search for information about the ships that sailed the bay. Almost immediately I found the same photograph on a website, and the ship’s name too. She was the Annie McLester, launched at Ulverston’s Canal Head shipyard in 1866, and part of a fleet of ships known as the Duddon fleet until her loss at sea in 1891 after striking Big Scare Rocks off Luce Bay in Wigtownshire. She broke apart and the bodies of two men were found, washed ashore down the coast at Port William. Of the other two crew members, there was never any trace.

I found a story about her too, of how another schooner, The Ulverston, berthed alongside the Annie in the Ulverston Canal was being loaded with gunpowder. She had caught alight with 80 tons of powder aboard. Two of the crew members from the Annie McLester saw the fire and boarded the ship to put the fire out before it had a chance to spread to the hold. I wonder if they were ever rewarded for this, or were just mightily relieved.

I keep the photograph of the Annie McLester in my writing room, wrapped in paper to protect it, but writing this I brought it out again into the light. There’s a nice triangle of belonging associated with it, this piece of buried treasure. It has my dad’s hand on it, and it shows the place we lived and where I grew up, where I had hills and rock slabs and a lighthouse that had no light for a playground. And then it became a subject for me to write about.

* * *

Following the shore northwards from Hest Bank it wasn’t long before I came to the sign that marks the starting point of the historic nine-mile cross-sands route to Kents Bank, the traditional way into and out of Furness before the railways came. The message on the sign was unequivocal:

The Public Right Of Way Across The Bay To Kents Bank Crosses Dangerous Sands. Do Not Attempt To Cross Without The Official Guide.

Before the railway arrived in 1857, linking remote Furness at last to the rest of the country, crossing the sands was the major route to the north. In the Middle Ages the monks who controlled the economic strongholds of Furness Abbey and Cartmel Priory instigated the necessity of guides on the sands. The monks’ whole way of life, their trade and their communication with the outside world depended upon crossing the sands into and out of Furness. The first guide, Thomas Hodgson, was appointed in 1548, and since then the position has been a royal appointment. Cedric Robinson is the 25th person in the job, and has held the title ‘Queen’s Guide to the Sands’ since 1963. Cedric and his wife, Olive, live in Guides Cottage at Kents Bank, a traditional Lakeland farmhouse next to the shore and the railway that skirts the bay. The house, four fields and the handsome sum of £15 a year are his payment for guiding people safely across the sands, for keeping the old way open.

There are, though, other guides, each one having specialist knowledge of the particular area they serve. Until recently Alan Sledmore and fisherman Stephen Clarke led walks from Morecambe or Hest Bank over the long crossing to Kents Bank. The guide for Ulverston Sands, Raymond Porter, fishes off Canal Head and holds walks from Conishead to Chapel Island, and John Murphy from Barrow leads walks from Walney Island across to Piel Island.

* * *

I came to a small headland with low, exposed sandstone cliffs. Wind-sculpted thorn trees gripped the steep slope, arching their dense branches towards the gradient, lit by the merest suggestion of new green. This odd, late spring had us all talking; the nonsense of snowdrops out at the same time as daffodils, and even bluebells popping up simultaneously in small numbers.

A small group of walkers were following the footpath that traversed the crest of the headland. They were walking away from the sea, towards the hills. The landscape at the edge of the bay speaks of this slow shift of environment, each segueing into the next. It evolves from rocky shore to farmland, from saltmarsh to sand and from limestone outcrops at the edge of the sea to the bluffs of Arnside Knott and Warton Crag. Further north, at the head of the bay is the cliff-edged escarpment of Whitbarrow. Looking out from the shore there was a strong sense of the arms of the land growing and enfolding the whole bay.

Bumblebees, awake at last, surfed the air, passing me like motorcyclists making lazy swerves round bend after bend. I noticed bladderwrack, a sign of the real sea. Inland, a train sounded its horn, and as I sat on the bank to eat my sandwiches a skylark began to splash its song across the sky. The heady scent of gorse came drifting down from the top of the headland. The sounds and sensations of late spring and a nod towards the summer were beginning to appear.

There was a small wood close by and birdsong was spilling out; it was all going on in there. In the warmth of that morning birds were eyeing up the opposition, picking up signals, proclaiming themselves taken or available. And let’s face it, bird song is really all about sex. It’s about courtship, mating and territory and the primal urge to procreate, to bring about new life, or to put it another way, to protect and survive. Above it all, a blackbird sang to the morning, as though asking questions, and answering them himself. He seemed an optimistic, glass-half-full sort of a bird.

I began to retrace my steps back along the shore, and then I sensed a slight movement amongst the stones in front of me and I stopped, dead still. A wheatear was picking about in the gaps between stones, apparently unconcerned by how close I was to him. I watched as he worked a radius over the pebbles and through the tideline. The circle he made as he hopped was perfect, as if drawn with a school compass. His tail bobbed constantly as he investigated the ground.

It’s likely that the name wheatear originates from the Norse for ‘white-arse’; there’s a telltale splash of white across the rump. They also have a dark, almost exotic eye-stripe. This one, a male with a bright blue back, was completely indifferent to me, and continued to investigate underneath a large boulder in the middle of his route.

The wheatear makes one of the longest migration journeys of any small songbird. They over-winter in sub-Saharan Africa and journey north into Europe, Greenland, Asia, Canada and Alaska to breed, then return south a few months later. This bird might’ve only just arrived and was in need of a good meal. Or perhaps this was a stopping-off point, like a motorway re-fuelling stop for a much longer journey deeper into the northern summer.

Over the bay the sky was empty and blue. The cloudscape had moved outwards, so that cumulus cloud streets formed over the land. An older couple walked the shore in front of me; the woman wore pink and the man blue. They walked hand-in-hand, laughing as their small, brown and white patched terrier jumped the sea-pools, skittering about and chasing sticks at the speed of a small rocket.

A moment came when I felt a shift of emphasis in the air, and looking into the distance towards the sea there was a line of movement, travelling at speed. The leading edge of the tide, or the bore, was coming in as a spreading strip of white with the sunlight catching its prow. The line shifted, forming, breaking, shifting and forming again. Raucous gulls began to move out from the land into the bay as if announcing the sea’s arrival.

The sea was rounding Morecambe pier and sliding in towards me. Behind the leading wave the water was the sienna colour of unfired clay. Oystercatchers came winging in. The sense of movement was palpable, the water moving, pulsing, a shimmer here, another over there.

At the water’s edge black-headed gulls rode low thermals. They were slow-winged, nonchalant. They banked and turned, landed, lifted and moved on, all their movements mirrored by oystercatchers. The temperature dropped again as the wind increased, pushing the sea in front of it.

A pair of gulls took it in turns to rise and fall, one over the other, tumbling and ascending again into the blue. Out of nowhere a cloud of dunlin appeared, peep-peep-peeping their insistent call. Moving as a cohesive whole, they broke apart then coalesced again. Another group came in, low to the horizon. They were an arrow arcing, shooting, measuring the distance. In 30 seconds flat they’d quartered the whole bay, passing close in front of me and doubling back again, crossing the sky where seconds ago their wing-beats broke the air. They came in like distant messengers from the sea.

As the water came, slivers of sandbanks were left uncovered and larger areas too. Where the water filled, the colour changed to silver-grey. As the tide progressed towards Arnside, the water began to slap against the boulders out on Priest Skeer, another glacial slag-heap further out from the shore. The water continued to bounce off the boulders and from the shore it was as if white flags were being raised and lowered, raised and lowered.

Another smaller group of waders came speeding in close formation, then 50 or more oystercatchers materialised with black-headed gulls as outriders. They moved with such speed, like specks of paint flung from the end of a painter’s brush. The air was suddenly filled with birds, their sounds and their patterns, as if they were taking part in some wild celebration for the return of the tide. Rising and falling in wave form, they moved as fish-shoals move, turning in the ocean; that singular, forceful choreography.

The sea had pushed beyond Arnside Knott on its way to the northern reaches of the bay. Two fingers of sandbank remained though, waiting to be engulfed. Abruptly, all the birds seemed to have dematerialised and then the sea had arrived in its entirety, no scraps of sand remaining. The blackened remains of the wharf had disappeared again underneath the wind-powered water. I walked up onto the grassy bank, the place my parents had sat in their deckchairs in the 1960s.

I turned for one last, lingering look at the bay, and saw that the birds had landed again. There were so many of them, out at the sea’s edge, and in the intense sunlight reflecting on the edge of water it was as if the sea was fizzing. The siren at the level crossing sounded again, announcing another high-speed train. As always, it was hard to leave the sea. The real sea, for what else could it be?