At
low tide, the retreating sea exposes a huge area of sand along the north-west
coast of England. The shallow tilt of
the seabed means the water moves far away and the land extends beckoningly in
its wake. In Morecambe Bay the Ordnance
Survey maps show public rights of way crossing this intermittently uncovered
landscape but with dire warnings of going there without an experienced guide. This year, as part of an activity organised
by my employer’s charity partner, Action for Children, I had the opportunity to
make a crossing of the bay in the company of Cedric Robinson MBE, the Queen’s
Guide to the Sands, and one or two hundred other walkers.
It
makes sense to cross in a big party, otherwise Cedric would be back and forth
all the time to earn his £15 per annum.
Everyone was in a jolly mood, somewhat masking a slight sense of
trepidation about what we were embarking on.
How safe was it? What if the
weather turned, as the forecast hinted it could? Thoughts of the Chinese cockle-pickers, left
to die by exploitative gangmasters in the fast-rising tide, hovered around the
backs of our minds.
With
it being such a large party, only a few people were close enough to receive
Cedric’s instructions first-hand, but somehow everyone snaked off along the
route in crocodile-fashion, if a rather over-stuffed crocodile. Cedric rode a tractor and sent his helpers
out to keep people on track. At one
point, congregating by a body of water awaiting further instructions, some
people set off. ‘They’ve not been told
where to go,’ Cedric was heard to mutter darkly, ‘they’ll get into
trouble.’ Nevertheless they all headed,
by some sort of herd instinct, between the laurel branches that the guides had
planted in the sand some time earlier to show where the safe route was.
After
one water crossing I found myself in the front of the throng and turned back to
see the masses splashing and laughing their way through the channel. It made me think of the Israelites crossing
the Red Sea into the Promised Land, although we were nothing more than a group
of paying individuals, all out for a good time.
And Cedric was no Cecil B De Mille.
‘Are you Mr Robinson?’ someone asked him. ‘Cedric,’ he replied, gruffly.
Given
that we were going to cross some standing water, I, along with a number of
others, had elected to ditch the shoes early on. At first I wasn’t sure this was the right
option. The drier parts of the dark sand
were sculpted into long flowing ridges and it was like walking over the endless
ribcages of dead creatures. My feet were
getting a brutish kind of massage. At
other times I felt the well-publicised patches of quicksand. The surface bowed beneath my step like a soft
plasterboard ceiling you’re about to put your foot through when up in the
loft. In some places the sand was much
more waterlogged and felt comfortable and soft.
There were many cockleshells scattered on the ground, broken up by the
waves or scavenging birds. The way the
daily tides moved the silt, constantly changing the course of the River Kent
that cut along the centre of our route, seemed to have sifted out fragments of
shell into one particularly gritty, if not uncomfortable, section.
It
was a warm day though overcast. Far into
the walk the rain started to fall, heavily for a time, and we all reached for
our jackets. The distant hulk of Heysham
power station vanished from sight, as did a certain amount of the coastline
around us. It added to the sense of
disorientation I had been feeling anyway.
I knew we were supposed to cross from Arnside to Kent’s Bank, just west
of Grange-over-Sands, but I couldn’t understand why we were walking towards
Heysham, somewhere far to the south.
Ahead of us was nothingness, just the long flat line of the horizon. Under the grey skies, the water and the wet
sand, and the sky itself, merged into one another. Robert MacFarlane talks about the horizon
drawing us on as much as a mountain top draws us up.
We
had stopped at the first body of water we came to and I was expecting us to
make a turn. On being told to carry
straight on through the water, it suddenly felt that we could just keep walking
on and on into this endless plain. Left
and right hardly made sense any more. It
was a strange feeling in an alien landscape, a ‘xenotopia’, in MacFarlane’s
coinage, an ‘out-of-place place’.
Ripples of sand caught what brightness there was, with little wavelets
of wormcasts on the ripples’ summits; water stood, unruffled by the wind, in
steely masses. What was solid and what
liquid? Out on the seabed prairie with
distant hills behind us, I thought of Stevie Smith, ‘I was always too far out,
and not waving but drowning.’
It
was exhilarating to have your senses challenged out in the bay and it felt
daring to have walked out into a dangerous world, a provisional zone between
land and sea. Boundaries and borders are
always thrilling places and this was an odd, transitional space in between the
two. Back on solid, unambiguous dry land,
celebrating with cake, we all felt euphoric to have come through the experience.
