A Guide to Morecambe Bay by David Cawley

Buckets, spades and other colourful plastic beach tools do not sell well in these parts. On the surface, this is a normal everyday seascape played out around the British Isles. Boats dotted around the promenade edges at jaunty angles on a hissing mud scored by rivulets and streams. Birds screech and quarck overhead in search of food. Cockles, shrimp, mussels and flounder, once famous in the local markets and restaurants of Lancashire and beyond are now almost the monopoly of oystercatchers, cormorants or other 150 other species found here.

All very nearly normal. But while the residents and visitors to this resort are happy to amble up and down the Victorian promenade carrying ice cream cones, few venture down the concrete steps to the sand below. From the raised safety of paving the huge inviting expanse of  Morecambe Bay sands can take your breath away, for the misguided, tempted to ignore the countless warning signs, this can be quite literally, for beneath the calm exterior deadly forces are at work to seduce the unwary and unsuspecting.

The Morecambe Bay Walk

The Irish Sea is a dim and distant line on the horizon. Across the scene to the north, the mountains of the Lakeland’s lead down to the bay’s edge sheltering the smart and affluent Grange over Sands. On the outskirts of this genteel Victorian holiday resort lives Cedric Robinson, who with his wife Olive, have built up a small cottage industry based on the Morecambe Bay Walk.

Throughout the year 100s of group organisers rely on octogenarian Olive, to arrange bay crossings for 1,000s of people with pin point accuracy. Each and every year, with nothing more than a telephone, a small occasional table, a large diary and endless cups of tea a remarkable operational process takes place in the corner of a living room.

They receive no payment other than an annual bursary and the sale of Certificates at the end of each walk. While Olive deals with the administration Cedric spends each and every day studying the Bays conditions from his bedroom window, or out on the sands marking a route with Bay tree branches from his front garden (Known as “brobs”, the visible leaves remain attached despite the salt water) for the following days excursion, “Look at what it gives you out there and make the best of it”.

There are many repeat participants and bookings are taken from around the world. Television crews from Japan and America have recorded interviews with Cedric, while The Duke of Edinburgh, Melvyn Bragg and Bill Bryson are just some of the names to have spent the day with him.

The area can never be accurately mapped because of the twice a day changes brought on by the tides and the always unpredictable English weather. These two natural phenomena also affect the Kent and Leven rivers flowing into the Bay which never follow the same course twice or maintain a constant depth or reliable bed. The conflicting currents of the incoming and out going tide can have a lethal effect on the terrain. Large holes locally known as ‘melgraves’ are scoured out of the ground; Cedric has seen cavities that, “you could drop a double decker bus in and it would disappear”.

Sand and mud is constantly shifting and changing consistency; when the sea is drawing out, water drains away unevenly below the surface sometimes trapping air to create quicksand. “T’auld fishermen have a saying, if it bends it bears, but if it breaks, then get out quick”. He has tales to tell of vanishing fishermen, carts and tractors into the quicksand. Horses are luckier and through some grand design that includes extra ballast, have the ability, once swallowed, to rise back up to the surface again. A memorable experience no doubt for both onlooker and horse.

Shifting Terrain and Sand Pilots

The speed of the incoming tide can also cause havoc for the unsuspecting. Three feet high tidal bores are not uncommon. Cedric points out that, “When the tide comes in it comes faster than a horse can gallop”. There are countless stories of the phenomena catching out the unsuspecting. In 1987, two teenage boys went missing while on holiday and Cedric was given the unenviable job of pin pointing where the bodies might be found and explaining to one set of parents how and why the tragedy could have happened to their son.

Since his appointment in 1962 this quietly spoken gentleman has become legendary in these parts, his unique calling as appointed “Sand Pilot” has a legacy dating back to the 14th-century and the local Cistercian Monks. They arrived in the north west of England on the back of a breakaway from what they considered a decadent Benedictine Order in France and began the construction of Furness Abbey in 1127 at ‘Beckansgill’ or ‘valley of the deadly nightshade’.

As per Cistercian specifications the site was isolated and well protected on all sides by geography – the Irish Sea to the west, the bogs and mountains of the Lake District to the north and the treacherous and unpredictable Morecambe Bay to the south and east. But despite this self imposed solitude, the way of the ‘White Monks’ was one of hospitality above and beyond day to day charity work and tending to the sick. To help them cross the bay sands, early records show that the Abbey and its nearby ‘Mother’ chapter houses lit beacons and offered prayers, “for the safety of travellers then occupied in this perilous event”.

Some 200 years later it dawned on the then Abbott that perhaps they weren’t opening their doors to as many guests as they perhaps should. In 1326, conscious that something was amiss he asked King Edward II for a coroner to help solve the peculiarity of why so many crossing the Bay en route to the Abbey never actually arrived. Yet it took another 200 years for a solution to be found when ‘Edmonstone’ was appointed in 1521 as the first person to receive payment for guiding people safely across the bay.

This responsibility was to stay with the Abbey until Henry VIII’s petulant dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and the obligation was passed onto the Duchy of Lancaster, then and now the largest landowners in the area. The first actual patent of the role was given to one Thomas Hodgson in 1548. Included in the job package was a nominal annual payment and “one tenement in Kent’s Bank…called Carter Howe, with three closures of land to the same adjacent”.

The Bay Today

The house and smallholding is still part of the arrangement today for those officially appointed as ‘Queen’s Guide to the Kent Sands of Morecambe Bay’. Guide’s Farm as it is now known sits on the edge of the bay and since 1857 has been separated from the sands by an embankment carrying the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway. Not only does this protect the occupiers from invasion by salt water during high tides and stormy weather but ironically it now carries people quickly around the danger.

Before its construction and the nearby turnpike road, the quickest route to the Furness peninsular was to cross the Bay and knock 19km off a safe 38km journey. Since the mid nineteenth century the need to cross the sands by foot or any other form of transport has been eliminated. As Cedric Robinson explained, before the railway and road, “The mail coaches crossing the sands would often lead a group of people on foot who thought they would be safe behind a carriage and driver who knew the best way…usually they couldn’t keep up and were left behind. The wheel tracks could be hidden by fog or disappear in the sand and those on foot might never be seen again”.

Today only the dwindling number of fishermen and casual strollers unaware of the dangers and blind to the hundreds of signs around the bay are at risk.

Now in his seventies, thoughts must soon be turning to find a replacement for Cedric. The decision rests with the Duchy to find a custodian of the “knowledge”. Given there are fewer and fewer fishermen making a living from Morecambe Bay who would appreciate the intricacies and dangers, finding a suitable candidate may be a tall order, if not impossible.

Up until his appointment, the role of guide had been one of necessity. Cedric Robinson realised an opportunity to share his enthusiasm of the Bay with the wider public and the sight of this benign gentleman, whistle around his neck and staff in hand leading a pilgrimage of up to 200 people, their bodies naked from the knees down almost invites biblical comparisons