Five

David Cox – The Road Across the Sands

I’m looking into a painting. In it there’s a straggling line of people, horses, carriages and carts travelling across the sands of Morecambe Bay. It’s as if they’re travelling to the very edge of the world. On an indistinct horizon, where the sands and the sky merge, an ominous squall builds strength and carries with it fast-moving grey cloud. A mere ghost of the sun glimmers through air made opaque by blown sand.

In the middle ground is a passenger coach pulled by a pair of horses. Four wagons, loaded to toppling height, follow one behind the next. There’s a sense that at any moment one of them might lurch sideways, its wheels bedding into soft ground and becoming fast in the sands.

A horse with its head held low labours underneath the weight of two riders. A woman walks holding a basket on the top of her head and she struggles to keep it there; she’s frustrated, at her wits’ end. Tucked in beside her a young girl attempts but fails to shelter from the weather against the older woman’s body. Their clothing ripples like fast-moving currents in water, constantly distorted by the head-on wind. Both are barefoot.

The more I Iook into the painting, the more I become aware of the gathering strength of the wind that moves over the surface of the bay. I can imagine the cut and the bite of it; the way that bodies cool down rapidly in exposed places.

‘Market Traders Crossing the Sands’ is one of dozens of paintings and drawings made of Morecambe Bay by the 19th-century painter David Cox (1783–1859), a major figure in the ‘Golden Age’ of British watercolour painting. From the end of the 1700s until the early 1900s, British artists working in this medium were in demand across Europe. Watercolour had become cutting edge. In France artists like Delacroix were looking north to Britain and emulating the light, the sparkle and luminosity that painters here were achieving through working in layers of transparent wash. Cox and his contemporaries J.W.M. Turner (who also travelled north and painted the bay), John Sell Cotman and later the Pre-Raphaelites John Ruskin and Whistler opened up possibilities in paint that were entirely new, different in every way from the properties of oil paint. And watercolour had major advantages over oils: it was lightweight, portable and quick-drying and was therefore wholly practical for artists who wanted to travel and make work away from their studio. The new breed of pleasure tourists sought out small-scale images on paper as ideal mementoes of their travels – the postcard or photographic equivalent of the time.

Watercolour was also the perfect medium to show the mutability of our weather: ‘its fleeting and shifting atmospheric effects, subtle transitions of light and half-light, and the opalescence of water, clouds and mists.’8 This description by the art historian and watercolourist Dr Patricia Crown could have been written with the paintings of David Cox specifically in mind. In a 2009 review of a David Cox exhibition, the Telegraph critic Richard Dorment described Cox as ‘a painter of sudden showers, big skies, scudding clouds and sun rising through mist over wet sand’. He argued that Cox’s depictions of people fighting their way through ‘empty landscapes under driving rain’ were a realistic representation of the hard nature of travel at the time.9 Numerous times Cox painted the bay, its weather and its people. From 1834 he spent six years visiting, journeying out onto the sands and recording what he saw. He documented the lives of those who travelled across the bay or who worked on its surface. These paintings are truly elemental.

Another painting. A day of dense air with a sun that only just breaks through, glimmering distantly. Two horses, one ridden by a man and woman and the second, a grey ridden by a man who has an air of knowledge about him. It’s probable that he is the guide-across-the-sands. He points to a group of ghost travellers who materialise from the opacity of mist. His dog, ever alert and with its tail held high, appears slightly unsure of what it is exactly that is coming into focus in front of him. A carriage, possibly two, and a couple of people walking and carrying loads are coming towards the guide. They might be emerging from the waters of the River Kent. A flock of gulls land and lift, unconcerned by the weather.

Search for David Cox paintings and they ping up in different places. One of the ‘Lancaster Sands’ oil paintings sold at Bonham’s in London in 2006 for £20,400. Again, a group of travellers move towards the front of the image. Some have covered themselves with blankets. It’s raining, and it’s cold, wet Cumbrian rain. The light is flat and grey. The tide follows the travellers, almost snapping at their heels.

Cox’s paintings hold a lens up to the social history of the bay. But I found another piece. ‘Lancaster Sands, Morecambe Bay’ shows a group of cockle pickers being called in by their foreman, who is blowing his horn as bad weather approaches and the tide turns. A group of exhausted-looking, silhouetted figures wade through an area where the sea has already reclaimed the bay. It’s impossible to ignore the resonance that travels on from 2004.

* * *

Cox lived through an age of change on an unprecedented scale. The Industrial Revolution had bedded in, people had moved into towns as work patterns changed, and yet for many living in the Morecambe Bay area subsistence farming and fishing remained the basic economy. Transportation of goods was essential and the cross-sands route was the lifeline for many. It was, to put it simply, the M6 of its day. Smallholders from Furness depended on the route to travel to the economically important markets at Lancaster, and for people travelling on to Scotland there was no alternative but to come this way. The much longer journey by the edge-lands was considered even more dangerous; it crossed rivers and bogs and exposed travellers to potential robbery.

William Wordsworth regularly accessed the Lakes by the cross-sands route. I like this, the idea that he set foot on dry land again on the shore adjacent to my home town of Ulverston. He described in almost blissful tones a journey he made in perfect weather, chronicled in his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude (1850):

Over the smooth sands

Of Leven’s ample estuary lay

My journey, and beneath a genial sun,

With distant prospect among gleams of sky

And clouds and intermingling mountain tops,

In one inseparable glory clad...

* * *

There’s an ink and watercolour drawing, a sketch that Cox made from direct observation, called ‘Crossing Lancaster Sands’. The drawing shows a group of traders and travellers leaving the shore. They move onto the sands when the sea is only just retreating. The first people are walking or riding through the remnants of the tide. Setting off like this and at this point in the sequence of the tides gave the longest possible number of hours for the crossing, a tight six-hour period between high tides. Even so, the very idea of their journey seems biblical to me. With the inherent dangers of the tides and the state of the rivers, each journey was, in its own way, a voyage into the unknown.

Cox made numerous paintings with the title ‘Crossing Lancaster Sands’. He reworked the scene again and again but always with this raggle-taggle line of people crossing from one side or the other. He shows the workers, the weight of loads carried and the general sense of struggle involved. In this series of paintings and drawings those travelling in opposing directions meet one another, talk and bear witness to the weather coming into the bay from the west. They might be turning and looking back over their shoulders to where sinister clouds encroach and will in a matter of minutes expunge all the blue. The clouds are loaded with heavy rain and push strong winds in front of them. There’s a phenomenon in the bay area of the weather changing with the return of the tide. It may clear out to unbroken and ethereal blue, or bring cloud and rain. A south-westerly wind pushes the tide harder and faster. So the cross-sands guide, frequently shown in the paintings, will be delivering an unequivocal message: the travellers need to hurry, the tide is on the turn, the weather is deteriorating. Time is running out.

The guides had expert knowledge of the sands and the state of the rivers that were an unavoidable part of the journey across the bay. Working on horseback, they waited out at the river’s edge to ensure that all travellers, whether on horse or on foot or in carriages and coaches, could cross the rivers safely. There was a guide for the long crossing from Hest Bank to Kents Bank, and another for the shorter crossing from Flookburgh across the Leven to Ulverston. They then pointed out the safe direction of onward travel, avoiding quicksand and gullies over the remaining miles to the shore.

In Morecambe Bay there is great beauty at work but there’s also continuous inherent danger, and this links to the idea of the northern sublime. British writers taking the Grand Tour in the 17th and 18th centuries began to write about the notion that landscape can be appealing and beautiful whilst being simultaneously dangerous and something to be held in awe. One of the first to write on this subject, the Englishman John Dennis, wrote about his journey crossing the Alps in 1688 as being a pleasure to the eyes but also ‘a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy’.10

Much of the public’s awareness, or consciousness, of Morecambe Bay over the centuries comes from this same place, the idea of extreme beauty and terror in combination. The traveller or fisherman working the bay must have knowledge of tides and the changing nature of the sands, and most will have grown up within this tradition. Of tales of deaths, drowning and tragedies there is no shortage – a simple search brings up story after story, and in the churchyard of Cartmel Priory there are tombstones to travellers who perished during the crossing. The writer Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865), who lived for a time and holidayed beside the bay at Silverdale, wrote in her short story The Sexton’s Hero (1847) about the notion of true heroism.

In the story the travellers are late setting out due to the clocks being wrong, and they needed to cross and cross back again during the same six-hour low-tide so that the character Letty can get home to feed her young baby. ‘The fresh’ has come down (recent rainfall on the mountains filling the river that will have to be forded).

From Bolton side, where we started from, it is better than six mile to Cart Lane, and two channels to cross, let alone holes and quicksands. At the second channel from us the guide waits, all during crossing time from sunrise to sunset; but for the three hours on each side high−water he’s not there... He stays after sunset if he’s forespoken, not else. So now you know where we were that awful night. For we’d crossed the first channel about two mile, and it were growing darker and darker above and around us, all but one red line of light above the hills, when we came to a hollow (for all the sands look so flat, there’s many a hollow in them where you lose all sight of the shore). We were longer than we should ha’ been in crossing the hollow, the sand was so quick; and when we came up again, there, again the blackness, was the white line of the rushing tide coming up the bay...

By this time the mare was all in a lather, and trembling and panting, as if in mortal fright; for though we were on the last bank afore the second channel, the water was gathering up her legs; and she so tired out! When we came close to the channel she stood still, and not all my flogging could get her to stir; she fairly groaned aloud, and shook in a terrible quaking way. Till now Letty had not spoken; only held my coat tightly. I heard her say something, and bent down my head.

‘I think, John – I think – I shall never see baby again!’

Inevitably Cox’s scenes of people walking the sands bring to mind images of today’s cross-bay walks. With people raising money for charities, the walks are hugely popular with anything up to a couple of hundred people or sometimes double that on a good day. Cedric Robinson, the current Queen’s Guide to the Sands, leads his people on with a staff in his hand like a latter-day saint. People who take part in the walks will tell stories about it afterwards. About the scale of the bay when you’re out there, all that empty, unfamiliar space, and crossing the river maybe up to waist-height depending on how much rain had fallen the night before.

* * *

Cox’s ascendency to the world of high art came from unlikely beginnings. He was born in Birmingham to a blacksmith father and a mother who, though a miller’s daughter, was a forceful and educated woman. Instead of the expected trajectory of a life following his father’s footsteps in metalworking, Cox’s interest in art was encouraged. There’s a story that as a boy recovering from a broken leg he busied himself by painting paper kites. (It seems then that the sky had always held a fascination for him.) At the age of 15 he was apprenticed to a painter of miniatures producing portraits for the merchant classes. He went on to the position of assistant at the Birmingham Theatre, grinding pigments and preparing canvas ready for scene painting. By 1802, after just two years as an assistant, he was given the role of lead scene painter with his own team of assistants and was credited in the theatre’s programmes.

Later, his paintings became pieces of drama in their own right. He lived in London and Hereford, wrote books on painting and drawing, and was in demand as a teacher. I wonder about his parents though, what they made of their boy’s meteoric rise into the hub of society.

Cox travelled extensively in Britain, including through Wales, Derbyshire, Herefordshire, Lancashire and the Lakes, where he gathered information, drew and painted. His pastoral landscapes in oils bring to mind Poussin, Claude Lorrain and Constable, even Leonardo da Vinci. In these pieces of work, small figures are spotlit but insignificant against the epic scale of the landscape they move through. There might be ruins. There’ll be woods and trees alive with weather, and forests, mountains and lakes. People will be at work on the land, and it was hard work, unsentimentally shown.

In a number of these paintings there’s a sense of paint applied at speed, of the quick change of a brush and the need to get it all down before the light changed, as if, in contrast to the high art of his more formal landscapes in oils, Cox allowed himself the freedom to paint things that really interested him and that animated him. These are places that fed him and gave him energy, and there’s a sense of the style moving towards impressionism. The works are simpler, detail has been stripped away and there’s a frisson of excitement about them. As with the Morecambe Bay paintings, there’s a sense of tension about what might happen next.

In ‘Cottage on a Hillside’ grey-white clouds are moving at speed, disintegrating and revealing a high cold blue above. Just a handful of brush-strokes and the clouds are complete. A woman hangs a line of sheets and garments out to dry on the line beside her cottage and over the hedge bordering her cottage garden. She is dwarfed by the washing, almost subsumed by it. There is so much of it; the washing on the line snaps in strong gusts of wind. The wind lifts the washing up and the woman struggles to control it. She wants it back in its place on the hedge-top, but the wind has other ideas. This was a woman whose business was washing, and she needs to take care of it. At any moment the piece she’s struggling with might be snatched from her hands and borne away. A chemise might lift at the edges before being worked free despite the woman’s best efforts. The body and sleeves could become lifted and filled with air before being carried away, a shirt, worn by the wind.

In the painting ‘Night Train’, made in 1849, the coming of the steam train collides against a more innocent world. In a sky almost as turbulent as a scene from a John Martin landscape, a quarter-crescent moon breaks through ultramarine clouds. A steam train intrudes into this pastoral landscape along a horizon blurred by low cloud. A white horse careers away from it whilst another, more solid horse watches alert, impassive. There’s a sense of the edge of land segueing towards a flat expanse that is entirely like Morecambe Bay. The engine’s boiler is hot and red, an ember distantly glowing. Steam flowing over the train’s carriages has been made by the technique of ‘scratching out’, where the artist has used a sharp point to scratch the paint carefully away to reveal the white paper underneath. ‘Here,’ Cox might be saying, ‘soon enough these trains will put an end to the very idea of the cross-sands route. It will become scratched out, an anachronism, obliterated by progress. This, right here, right now, is the future.’