When I say it was a fine day, I suppose I really mean it wasn’t raining. In fact we merely had drizzle in the morning. There again, I suppose it was so overcast we never got full daylight either but you cannot have everything. Still lady wife and I went to Ulverston to hear Bishop James speak. He’s a chap who’s always worth listening to. When we left Ulverston we stopped at Roy’s for an icecream (also something always worth doing) and I walked home from there along the beach.
The first section is very different to the rest of the area round the bay. The woods come right down to the beach, protected by the limestone pavement they’re growing on.
Because the bay is fed by two rivers, they interfere with each other and the channels are always changing. Because of this, the area where I could swim as a child is now this.
But in another fifty or so years the channels will doubtless move back and scour the whole lot out again. In Morecambe Bay, everything is pretty transient really.
About the only thing that’s constant is the vast expanse of flat ground, It’s not golden sand, but it’s not really mud either. At times, where a channel is scoured out, you find great drifts of cockleshells buried by the mud a century or so ago.
But the hand of man is there. On the flat rocks where back in the 1970s a lot of people used to swim they carved a message to the future.
And of course the scene isn’t always this peaceful. At this point the sea broke through the old sea defences and came within six feet of breaking through the main road
Interestingly they’ve moved away from concrete defences (although they do patch the old ones with new concrete.) Instead they’re using these big boulders. The idea is that they naturally lock together and if the sea does move them, you just wait for low tide and go in with a tracked digger to just move them back
In the whole trip, I saw four people, three of whom were walking dogs, and only one was close enough to say ‘Hello’ to. And the silence out there on the sands is profound. The only noise is the wind, or occasionally the tide in the distance.
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And to help you enjoy the silence, a good book?
As a reviewer commented “Another great collection of bite-sized tales from the author’s farming life. (The first one being ‘Sometimes I dit’s and thinks’)
A gentle sharing of observations from a sheep farmer (and his collie)
More wry observations of animals and humans!”
Jim Webster 