Morecambe Sands

The perils of the sands feature in Elizabeth Gaskell's short story 'The Sexton's Hero' where a rejected suitor loses his life saving his sweetheart, now another man's wife, from the incoming tide. A good fictional glimpse of the sands and their strange atmosphere is also given in the opening pages of Melvyn Bragg's The Maid of Buttermere (1987), where the imposter Hatfield walks out into the solitude of the Bay to practice his new role as The Honorable Alexander Augustus Hope.
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In 1857 railway viaducts were built across the estuary, putting an end to most cross Bay traffic, but the present Queen's Guide to the Sands, Mr Cedric Robinson, still takes parties of walkers across, marking the route in the traditional way with 'brobs', branches of laurel embedded in the sand, which will survive several tides before being dislodged (they can be clearly seen in Turner's paintings). The walks, however, now leave from Arnside, for in 1980 the Kent shifted its bed and the Hest Bank route is now unsafe.

Finally, a footnote from the Lancashire humorist Edwin Waugh, who tells us (in Over Sands to the Lakes, 1882) that a gentleman once asked a guide if his colleagues were never lost on the sands. 'I never knew any lost,' said the guide; 'there's one or two drowned now and then; but they're generally found somewhere i'th bed when th'tide goes out.'
The very name of Morecambe Bay is testimony to the spell cast by books over the landscape hereabouts. Until the eighteenth century the estuary was known simply as 'Kent Sands'. But the Greek geographer Ptolemy, in his Geographia (c 150AD), mentions an estuary somewhere in NW Britain called 'Morecambe'.

 In 1771 Whitaker's History of Manchester suggested that Ptolemy's Morecambe might be the Kent Sands. The identification was popularised by Thomas West in his Antiquities of Furness (1774), the first guide book to the area; educated tourists began to use it and soon the Bay had a new name. The seaside resort grew later, and now everyone knows Morecambe. (But if you look at a map of the Carlisle area you will see a small estuary just s of the Solway Firth called 'Moricambe'; this is a relic of another, and less popular, attempt at identifying Ptolemy's estuary.)