Things to do in Morecambe Bay

Some way outside the Lake District proper, at Hest Bank, 6m N of Lancaster. If you had travelled northward to the Lakes at any time before 1857, this is where your real journey would have started, crossing the sands of Morecambe Bay at low tide to avoid twenty miles of bad roads and heavy tolls to Cartmel.

hotels in the lake district

For the point where travelers turned away from land and ventured out across the Bay, leave the M6 motorway at junction 34, following signs for Morecambe, then for the Promenade. Go N along the coast road; pass the Hest Bank level crossing and turn L at sign for Morecambe Lodge and Red Bank Farm; follow road down to car park. The road continues, unmealled, over a belt of pebbles and grass, then disappears into the sand. The journey across the Bay made a magical beginning to a Lakeland tour; as Wordsworth put it.

The Stranger, from the moment he sets his foot on those Sands, seems to leave the turmoil and traffic of the world behind him; and, crossing the majestic plain whence the sea has retired, he beholds, rising apparently from its base, the cluster of mountains among which he is going to wander, and towards whose recesses, by the Vale of Coniston, he is gradually and peacefully led.

At low tide the sea exposes more than 120 square miles of sand: an extraordinary, shining desert. Crossing it is perilous. There are quicksands, shifting river channels, and an incoming tide which may vary half an hour either side of the official tables depending on wind direction, and can arrive as a wall of water six feet high moving faster than a man can run. Guides have always been essential. In medieval times they were maintained by the monks of Cartmel and Conishead Priories; since the dissolution of the monasteries they have been the responsibility of the Crown.

The Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe crossed the Leven Sands at the E side of the Bay on her 1794 tour and tells us that the Guide is punctual to the spot as the tides themselves, where he shivers in the dark comfortless midnight of winter, and is scorched on the shameless sands, under the noon’s of summer, for a stipend of ten pounds a year! and he said that he had fulfilled the office for thirty years.

The Lonsdale Magazine for February 1821 gives a splendid (albeit semi fictional) account of the crossing, supposedly written by a cheerful youth on a tour. We begin in the inn at Lancaster: I was aroused, by the bustle of preparation, about five o'clock ... I found my father, uncle, and sister already assembled. I was regaling my senses with the fumes of the coffee, when the driver unceremoniously burst into the room: 'For God's sake,' said he, 'make haste. The tide is down, and we should have been, by this time, at Hest Bank. If you delay, we shall all be drowned.

They arrive in time, and as they cross the Kent channel, A more picturesque, grotesque, touresque, or whatever other esque scene you may think fit to call it, I think I never saw. There could not be fewer than forty carts, gigs, horses, chaises, etc. with men, women, children, dogs, and I can hardly tell what beside, all in the river at once ... It would have been a fine model ... to draw the Passage of the Red Sea from ... The waves dashing through the wheels the horses up to the breast in water the vehicles, some driving one way, some another, in all imaginable confusion the carriers swearing the drivers cracking their whips the women and children screaming and the apparent impossibility of any of them ever escaping formed altogether such a coup d'oeil as I never had seen nor ever expected to see.