Last year The Clearing visited Morecambe Bay in a provoking and memorable essay by Paul Kingsnorth. We are very pleased this week to be returning with a fresh pair of eyes. Karen Lloyd has lived for most of her life near the bay and in what follows she visits this strange and challenging landscape with Cedric Robinson, the ‘Queen’s Guide to the Sands’.

On that day, after weeks of mild weather and hardly any rain, the Kent looked nothing like a river. How different its character from the clear, voluble stretches that tumbled and splashed down from the Kentmere hills, passing through the valley and woods close to our house in Kendal. It was the same element but there the comparison stopped. The river was wide and glossy, more a shallow, sky-reflecting lake than a flowing body of water as it arced towards the south on a lazy journey, passing Silverdale, Carnforth and Morecambe. The tractor pulled up at the rivers’ edge and we climbed down, then rolled our trouser legs high. Barry handed us each a sturdy wooden stick and each of us carried a bundle of brobs, hoisting them onto our shoulders. I left my brand new camera in the trailer. Andy was made of sterner stuff and took his along.

The men analysed the condition of the river, and from their talk it was as if it was a living being to them.

‘A wind from the north-west like today pushes the river slow and wide,’ Cedric said, ‘but a big wind and heavy rain makes it cut a direct path, and it’ll move at speed – much deeper too.’

I’ve spent significant periods of time walking alone in the mountains. I’ve been lost and disorientated in mists, but this was something new, this sense of flat space where distances are difficult. We were about four miles out on the bay, halfway between Humphrey Head and White Creek at Arnside. I wasn’t alone and of course I couldn’t have been in safer hands, but there was something about this landscape and our remoteness from land that made me uneasy; it was a new sensation for me. Cedric climbed back in the tractor, shouting as he did.

‘I don’t like this bloody tractor one bit. I don’t trust it either,’ and he headed away, leaving the three of us behind in the middle of that expanse of sand.

Image © Karen Lloyd

I’d planned an early morning rendezvous with Cedric Robinson, the nation’s only ‘Queen’s Guide to the Sands.’ We’d talked on the phone the evening before, and I found him still giddy, fizzing even, from having lunch with the Queen and Princess Anne on their official visit to South Cumbria that day.

‘We were asked to go into the dining room and find our place names. Well, I found two! One next to Princess Anne, and the other next to the Queen! So I went to find a steward and I told him and do you know what he said? He said “well, Cedric, it looks as if you will just have to choose for yourself who you sit next to.”

‘So,’ Cedric said, ‘I chose Princess Anne. And she was absolutely lovely, and do you know she was a very good conversationalist.’ I told him he’s a great one for hob-knobbing with royalty.

Cedric’s status in the Morecambe Bay area is legendary. His knowledge of the tides and the rivers that shift their route through the sands sometimes by a mile or more in one night is unsurpassed. He’s the fifty-fifth Guide to the Sands and has been in the job for fifty years. At eighty, he has the physique of a man half his age; he’s tall, tanned, (or weathered), big- chested and upright, a man in his element and comfortable in his own skin.

Cedric was going out to test the sands and the state of the river Kent ahead of two crossings later that week, one for a group of horse and carriage enthusiasts and then a weekend cross-bay walk. Any crossing depends on the weather, but more than that on the amount of rain that’s fallen on higher ground. In a bad summer like the previous four or five, more walks are cancelled than take place.

We planned to meet at Humphrey Head, a whale-backed, limestone outcrop projecting into the bay from the low lying fields of the Cartmel peninsula. Here, local legend would have you believe, the last wolf in England was pursued and killed.

Image © Karen Lloyd

Early the next morning I drove over from Kendal and into the small lanes that lead to the headland. Rounding a bend a young leveret was sitting mid-road, warming itself up in the sun. It moved off distractedly, lolloping ahead with black-tipped, pale-edged ears like vertical radar, switching direction continuously. Articulating its powerful hind legs, slowly it began to jig from side to side like a wind-up toy, all eyes, ears and legs and then disappeared under the shelter of a hawthorn hedge.

In the small car park under the cliff face the quality of silence was immediate; a rare moment. The engine ticked as it cooled and a wren chit-chitted in amongst young hazel and hawthorn on the cliff face, otherwise all was utterly still. Poking above the marsh grass to the south west, the turbines of Walney Wind Farm were illuminated by the low sun, glimmering like a row of distant candles. Standing beside Humphrey Head there’s an illusion that the surface of the bay slopes upwards, rising higher than the land around it. It’s a trick of the light and the land and the vast, flat distances. A woodpecker called from the scrub close by. I could see Hoad Monument, the hilltop lighthouse folly at Ulverston, standing out from the shadowed hills behind it. I’d learned the word ‘glas’ from the Welsh poet, Gillian Clarke, a potent word for the particular blue-green of hills. There it was, defining the white monument, the glas of Kirby Moor.

Forty five minutes after our agreed meeting time, a spindly, aged tractor bounced into view with Cedric at the driver’s seat, pulling an eccentric-looking jalopy, part child-catchers wagon from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and part ancient farm wagon. It was all patched ply-wood and weather-blasted Perspex.

‘Sorry we’re late’ Cedric said ‘I had to borrow a tractor. Mine’s gone in for a service.’

I told him not to worry, and climbed up into the trailer where his two assistants, Andy and Barry sat on a row of back-to-back benches. The floor was strewn with laurel branches. We set off. Within seconds, Cedric stopped and was down on the ground checking the best route across a deep gully, and then the same a second time. With a large shovel he dug out a smoother path, but we still held on tight as the tractor and trailer plunged into and out of each one, bucking and bouncing, before the tractor reached smoother ground.

I looked up above the cliffs of Humphrey Head and saw there, swivelling on the air, a peregrine. It folded its wings, dropped a distance, then rose up again on the morning thermals.

‘They’re doing well here,’ Barry said. ‘The young have fledged; we saw them a few weeks back.’

Travelling out onto the bay there was a new sightline of the headland. The rocks rose out of the sand, then continued upwards in folded waves of limestone. With a row of fence posts like tiny spines along the ridge it reminded me of a sea creature emerging out of, or plunging underneath the bay.

The tide had been out for hours but a layer of water remained like a second skin over the sands and in places there were deeper pockets and shallow lakes of standing water. The trailer rode into and out of channels like a ship ploughing the ocean. In the lee of the headland, a solitary egret stood white and motionless, like marble. Further out the surface of the sands changed and became smoother. We made a wide curving entrance to the bay.

Another shift in terrain and the trailer began to bounce up and down. We held on to the seats again, passing small cliff edges that had formed and collapsed again as big waves had washed against them. After that an area where the sands had formed into mounds, like the glacial moraine of a retreating glacier.

‘I call this the Somme’ Barry said, ‘These mounds come from the weight of the tide passing over areas of softer or more compressed sand.’

I saw cockles heaped up within the mounds, their edges semi-exposed like treasure.

‘The past few cold winters have finished them off. They’re mostly dead, no good to anyone’ he’d said. The beds had been closed since the cockling disaster in 2004; the echoes keep travelling.

The surface changed again and we moved on over a skin of perfectly becalmed water that reflected the sky, so that as I looked down we drove over intense cobalt-blue and cumulus cloud streets. The tyre marks fractured the surface, distances elided and light spooled on the sinuous ground like heavy white blossom. I remarked on the way the surface changes from one area to the next and Andy said ‘It does, all the time; every day sometimes. Over at Arnside the sands are as smooth as glass-paper just now.’

The guides have used laurel branches for centuries for marking the safe crossing routes over the sands. Their thick leaves stay on the branches even when submerged daily by the tide. They’re known as ‘brobs’. They’re there in the paintings of the bay that Turner made. We drove past brobs that had been put in position on previous visits.  From a distance they resembled people who had somehow been left behind, lone figures adrift on the empty bay.

‘That one; the one all on its own’ Barry said. ‘We call it the “man brob”’, as if he’d read my mind.

Image © Karen Lloyd

The three of us were standing at the edge of the river in the middle of the bay. Further downstream where Cedric had stopped the tractor, I watched as he wandered, looking, stopping, and setting new brobs. I began to wonder what time the tide was due in and how long we would be out there.

A helicopter droned in from the east and swung in closer to have a look at us. Resisting the temptation to wave I wondered what the people inside thought of us, standing at the edge of a river in the middle of the bay, miles away from land.

Barry and I paddled into the river. Andy was already mid way across and taking photographs. The waters changed gradually from shallow and clear to grainy, textured water that came above our knees. I stopped to hoist my trousers higher, then taking slow steps in the cloudy water, I let out a cry of surprise.

‘What’s up?’ Barry asked.

‘A fluke!’ I said, ‘I stood on a fluke.’

The squirming sensation had caught me unawares. The fluke was the flounder commonly found in Morecambe Bay.

‘Last time that happened I was about eight years old. My pal’s dad took us out to tread for them, but I remember I didn’t fancy the idea of standing on any.’ The traditional way of catching flounder is to feel for them with the feet, then reach in and under the water to pick out the fish before it had a chance to wriggle away.

A moment later there was the distinctive bounce of a fish on my leg. I wondered what, if anything, the fish thought about it.

Twice in the crossing Barry stopped to test the flow-rate with his low tech device. He simply watched the speed of the water pushing past his stick. We waded further and after some minutes came to the other side, throwing the brobs down in a heap. Andy arrived alongside us, and working together the two of them began setting the brobs into place. Andy pushed and wound his stick far down into the mud.

‘Are you ready?’ he said, then pulled out the stick as Barry pushed a brob down into the loosened sand, securing it as the mud and water closed the hole again.

Over our heads a small group of young gulls had come winging. They flew as if intoxicated, directionless, mob-handed, adolescent, their cries argumentative against the complete silence of the bay. They flittered down onto the sands and joined a long line of birds that had settled in to feed on the surface a distance away. Looking through the binoculars I saw that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of oystercatchers. I’d never seen so many in one place before.

I’d visited Cedric at home on a freezing February afternoon, and sitting in front of the banked up fire, my cheeks growing hotter by the minute, he’d told me his name for oystercatchers.

‘I call them “sea-pie”. They’re wonderful birds. I’ve watched them riding the bow wave when the bore comes in. Fifty years ago the bore was a very different kind of a beast. You could hear it coming a mile off, with a three foot standing wave at the front and sea-pie skimming the top of it. What a sight that was.’

Stitched in amongst the oystercatchers were countless gulls. Out there on the bay, it was the undisputed kingdom of birds.

Cedric drove back towards us. He climbed down and left the engine sputtering. ‘It’s changed its course again; do you think?’ he called across the river. Barry and Andy shouted agreement. ‘Significantly. Moved about half a mile I think.’

‘What’s that sticking out of the water? Is it a bird?’ Cedric asked.

‘I’ll go and have a look’ Andy said, and began walking downriver towards a dark object at the river’s edge. It didn’t fly away.

‘It’s a brob alright’ he shouted back to us. He pulled it out and re-set it on the river-bank.

‘We set them in pairs’ Barry said as we watched. ‘They’re like channel markers for shipping, so it’s clear where to cross the river.’

A dark rain cloud came close, pushed along by the westerly wind. We wondered if it would release its load onto us as we felt the first large splots of rain. But it skimmed past and headed Morecambe way. As it moved it grew darker and moments later bands of heavy rain fell from it. I could imagine tourists on the imported sand beaches at Morecambe stuffing towels into bags and rushing off to the cafés until it passed.

Cedric came wading back across the river towards us, and singing at the top of his voice. If Cedric formed a religion, I might be tempted to follow.

With the four of us together again, Cedric marked the time and the men made calculations about the tide times for the coming days. It’s crucial, of course, to get it right. That’s part of the reason the men were there; not just to test the riverbed for quicksand and mark safe crossings away from it, but also to mark the time and to know when to be back on dry land again. It was eleven thirty. In another four hours the place we stood would be submerged beneath ten metres of water.

Andy Mortimer FRSA ‘bayscapes’

Barry’s a blow-in of eleven years from Manchester. He wanted to know the names of the mountains that framed the view at the back of the bay. I named them for him.

‘That’s Fairfield, Red Screes, then the gap of Kirkstone Pass, then Caudale Moor and the hills of Kentmere; Froswick, Ill Bell and Yolk.’ Cedric overheard and said: ‘I’ve never heard of any of them.’ I wondered if he was having a joke. But maybe not, after all the bay is his territory; he’s on intimate terms with one hundred and twenty square miles of tidal estuary. I said ‘I like the fact that you can see the source of this river, the mountains of Kentmere, just there.’

Cedric pointed to a wide bend in the river a distance away. ‘See the way light sparkles on that stretch of water? That shows the river’s moving much faster down there.’ And I did, but a question formed itself, of how Cedric’s knowledge can be kept going into the future. You can’t archive this stuff, nor create a websites for it. You can’t communicate about this place by email; it has to be experienced.

Andy and Barry continued setting brobs. Cedric and I began to wade back across the river towards the idling tractor and we talked about the continuation of the over-sands route that crosses between Flookburgh and Ulverston. It involves the crossing of two more rivers, the Leven and the Crake. We’d stopped to talk mid river, and as we talked I found that my unease and that sense of unfamiliarity had all evaporated, moved away like the dark cloud, and all the while the river pushed on, pressing gently against our legs.

Oystercatchers slung past us in arrowhead formation. Nodding in their direction of travel Cedric said, ‘We’ll head over to that bank for our coffee.’ From a high vantage point and with the tide out the bay may appear to be one continuous stretch of sand. I couldn’t see a bank, but I knew that the bay was anything but flat. More pictures came to me from the winters’ afternoon by Cedric’s fire.

‘There are banks and gullies out there; great holes big enough to swallow a tractor, a double-decker bus even. We’d go night fishing, with tractors, depending on the state of the tides, fishing for shrimps. One night we were driving along in the moonlight and all of a sudden matey on my right disappeared, tractor and all. He’d gone straight into a massive gully. A ‘melgrave’ we call these big holes. Anyway, he managed to climb out alright but the tractor was another story. We never saw it again.’

He described too how, after yet another episode of unnervingly heavy rains that we’ve had over these past few years, he’d gone out to assess the state of the river. He said he’d been left almost without speech, and that’s something.

‘The river had cut a new channel overnight, six miles away from its previous course.’ He described the river that day as being ‘like a roaring sea.’

The tang of coffee filled the trailer and Cedric held court, telling us tale after tale. His is a rich, deep seam of powerful memories, and he offered them up with generosity, for our entertainment and I thought, for himself, for the vigour of remembering.

‘I’d gone out shrimping at night with our Jean. She was about twelve then I think. It was as clear as a bell when we set off; the stars were all out, and the moon, and you could see the lights of all the villages around the bay. It was a good night for navigation. We were miles out, and busy with the fishing, then when we came to go home I looked up and the fog had rolled in. We couldn’t see a thing. Well that night I navigated home by listening for the sound of the river. That did the trick. Anyway, we lived to tell the tale.’

Immense cumulus clouds streets had continued to form around the edge of the Bay. They built height over the land, leaving the sky above the bay a clear and potent blue. I’ve seen this so often, the sky clearing, as if putting itself in order ready for the approach of the tide. As we set off for Humphrey Head again, the headland appeared like a wave swelling out of the sands, and in the distance Peel Castle shimmered above translucent air. In the heat haze the hills of Furness were breaking up into segments that moved and danced.

On the journey back to land we passed close to the Man Brob, and as we drove past Barry said ‘A few weeks ago we came out and I could see something odd about the shape of it. As we got closer whatever it was took off. It was a peregrine. He’d been sitting there in splendid isolation until we came along.’

We were back, rolling over the saltmarsh and bumping into and out of the two gullies. Underneath the limestone cliffs, I climbed down. We said our farewells and the tractor disappeared up the lane. I listened as the hum of its engine faded off into the countryside until all was quiet again. I had a sense that those hours out on the bay would stay with me for a long time, glimmering like the river as it moved by degrees further and further into the distance.

Karen Lloyd lives in Kendal, Cumbria, and has lived for most of her life within a stone’s throw of Morecambe Bay. In November she was awarded a Distinction for her MLitt at Stirling University where her tutor was  Kathleen Jamie, and is working on a book, The Gathering Tide, about a journey around the edgelands of the bay.

With special thanks to Cendric Robinson, Andy Mortimer and Barry Kieran.

You can find out more about Paul’s work here: www.paulkingsnorth.net. All photographs are courtesy of Navjyoat Kingsnorth.

I live in a small market town in south Cumbria. The town sits in a low agricultural bowl, surrounded by rivers which rise from the surrounding hills and flow under, through and around the town and out to the sea. Five miles to the north, the Lake District fells begin. Less than two miles to the south is Morecambe Bay.

Before I moved here, I had no real awareness of the Bay. I knew that Morecambe was a seaside town, but I’d never been there. I heard on the news about the deaths of the Chinese cockle pickers here a few years back, and that seemed grim and strange. But I didn’t know how big and curious and captivating a place the Bay was.

I am, slowly, beginning to get it. I am beginning to see that the Bay is a great entity in itself, a living system; not just a backdrop to human activities but a  parallel world. This is the largest continual intertidal area in Britain; more than 300 square kilometres of shifting mud and sand, river estuaries, saltmarshes and sea life. The weather can change its character in minutes, and the position of the sun, the time of year, alters its look and feel. But the sea, above all, sets the mood. High tide down at Bardsea brings the waters almost to the edge of the sea road, with only a barrier of silted rushes between solid land and salt water. But at low tide, everything changes. At low tide Morecambe Bay becomes liminal space, a universe entire of itself.

I spend as much time down here as I can, writing and walking. Last summer, when I was writing a book, I used  my need for writerly solitude as an excuse to drive my old camper van down to the edge of the Bay, leave the doors open and write. And when writing had taken me over for too long and I needed to ground myself again, I ran. I changed my clothes and struck off out to sea and I ran as far as I could from land,  across the shifting sands, out into the middle of the Bay. This can be dangerous if you don’t know the tide times or you don’t know what quicksand looks like, but its dangers are also overstated, or at least that’s what I told myself. I liked this, anyway, because it meant that nobody else would ever follow me. It meant I was alone with the sand and the sky.

On the first day of September last year I wrote until midday and then I ran. I ran straight out, heading southwest. The sun was high and the sky was empty of clouds and the sea was a silver line on the horizon. I ran towards the great black rectangular block of Heysham nuclear power station, ten miles distant on the far shore. I ran for fifteen minutes and stopped at a shallow, silver river, only exposed when the tide is out, which was flowing low and snakelike across the sand. I had never seen it before. I turned.

Behind me was the far shore, my van a white speck on it, the hills rising behind it, the Coniston fells clear in the distance, their bands and steps clean in the white light. Along to the south the coast ran down to Barrow, the ruined castle on Piel Island just visible, an intimidation of distant wind turbines out to sea. On the far shore the table top of Ingleborough was clear on the horizon, the townlets of the Morecambe shore stretched out in silver, Blackpool tower a thin needle in the late summer haze.

I wasn’t alone there, though I was the only human. On the water a great flock of gulls was bobbing, moving on the slow current, sometimes taking off in pairs or singly, circling, coming down again. They were cawing and curling and calling in the sun. I crouched down and began sifting the muddy sand through my fingers. Tiny crustaceans skipped and crawled through the water. I looked up as a gull careened overhead, screaming.

And I had the strangest feeling, then. I felt like I was part of something very much bigger than myself. I didn’t think it, I felt it, and the feeling came entirely unbidden. I felt this place, this edgeland, this world of wing and water – I felt how it was working. I felt the clockwork of it, the movement, felt the blood of it flowing in the salt sea and in the movement of the gulls and in the sand and the riverflow. This was all part of some great living engine, working a task, ticking over, each of its constituent parts performing their function. I was looking on but I had no role. I wasn’t wanted here, or unwanted. I was jetsam, passing by on the tide.

In his essay The Etiquette of Freedom, the American poet Gary Snyder makes a distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘wild.’ He uses the word ‘nature’, he explains, in its broadest sense, to mean ‘the physical universe and all its properties.’ In this sense, everything on Earth is ‘natural’ because it doesn’t break the laws of nature. A rainforest is natural, but so is a space rocket. A badger is natural, but so is a plastic bag.

The word ‘wild’, on the other hand, denotes those portions of the physical universe which remain free from the agency of humanity; which are as yet untamed by the predator ‘Man’. Snyder writes that this definition of wildness:

Come very close to being how the Chinese defined the term Dao, the way of Great Nature: eluding analysis, beyond categories, self organising, self informing, playful, surprising, impermanent, insubstantial, independent, complete, orderly, unmediated, freely manifesting, self authenticating, self willed, complex, quite simple.

The undomesticated animal; the self-propagating plant; the unturned soil; the unmanaged woodland: these, says Snyder are ‘wild’. In this sense, the Bay is wild. Perhaps it is the wildest place in England, assuming that it is in England. Assuming that it is within the territory of Man and not the territory of the birds and the razor shells and the curling blades of kelp and the grey-brown waters.

We would like to think so, because we would like to imagine that the Bay can be tamed, as we imagine that everything wild can be tamed, should we choose. We would like to imagine this because we suspect, on some level, that it cannot. In 2004, 23 Chinese immigrant workers, who spoke little English and had misunderstood the tide times, were drowned harvesting the Bay’s cockle beds. There was some national outrage at this. It seemed incongruous; here we were in the mechanised, mediated 21^st century, and poor cockle pickers were still drowning on English mudflats, as they have done for millennia.

A lot of lessons were drawn from that tragedy; lessons about immigration and illegality and gangmasters and cheap labour and what our culture is prepared to pay for and turn a blind eye to. But the wider lesson was that the wild is still with us and needs to be negotiated with and respected. The Bay has been drowning humans since there were humans, and if you stand on the shore and watch the tide come in, you can see why. The seabed is shallow for a long distance out from the shore, and the angle of the sands is so obtuse that when the tide comes in it approaches like a mini-Tsunami.

On the stone pier at Arnside earlier this year, I watched the bore rising, heralded by a long series of blasts on a siren which echoed around the Bay as if warning of an air raid. Within minutes, a white line of water had built up across the horizon. Then it was breaking on the ramps and the bridge struts, and rising up the mud flats unstoppably. It could not have been outrun. If you don’t know what you’re doing or where you are, or if you’re not paying attention or you have had a close encounter with its many pools of shimmering quicksand, the Bay can claim you, more quickly than you would have believed possible.

Not that this happens very often any more. Before the Furness Railway was built around its perimeter in the 1850s, it was a different matter. For much of the history of human habitation around the Bay, getting from the Lancashire shore to the Furness peninsula meant crossing the sands. It was easier than attempting to walk or take packhorses or carts across the salt marshes around the edges or the hills and fells of Cumberland to the north. The old paths across the Bay still exist, and so does the Queen’s Guide to the Sands, the only such position in England, created after locals petitioned the King in the early 16^th century in an attempt to alleviate the many drownings that resulted from people trying to cross the Bay by themselves or with dubious local guides. The position is unpaid but it does come with a free house owned by the Crown. Nobody takes packhorses across the dangerous, shifting paths of the Bay any more, but the current Guide, Cedric Robinson, a former fisherman who was appointed in 1963, leads regular charity walks across the Bay by way of compensation.

Before the Queen’s Guides, the monks of Cartmel Priory would escort travellers across the bay, for an appropriately holy fee. The Priory was dissolved by Henry VIII, and four of its monks were hanged for resisting the tide of history. The remaining buildings of the Priory are a tourist attraction today, but other built relics scattered around the Bay have not been blessed with tea shops and introductory leaflets. The old canal at Ulverston, at just a mile long said to be the shortest in the country, which  carried goods ships from the Bay to the town for just a decade before the railways came and knocked it into the crumbling, appealing historical void in which remains today. The great shipyards at Barrow which furnished the Empire. The long-gone ironworks at Carnforth (and its long-gone railway station refreshment room, in which much of David Lean’s Brief Encounter was filmed in 1945; in a burst of enthusiasm, the refreshment room was recently recreated in its original form, and now draws film buffs from across the world).

And, beneath the waves, or sometimes half above them, the dozens of wrecks of ships which have found the tides and the sands here too much to handle over the centuries.  Sometimes, running across the sands at low tide, I see their ghosts: a few wooden ribs rising from the mudflats, rusted plates of riveted steel merging with the sand. The barnacles make good use of them, the Bay absorbs them, the engine keeps turning.

Relics are more easily created than we like to think. Walk around the Bay today and you can see tomorrow’s relics already in the process of being created. You can also see that the strange juxtaposition of the wildness of the sands and the human industry of the fringes continues as it has for centuries. Beyond the reclaimed salt marshes, where there were once ironworks, steelworks, shipyards or docks, there are now windfarms, nuclear power stations, the Glaxo pharmaceutical plant at Ulverston – soon to be rebuilt and expanded – and, in Barrow, where the Furness peninsula slopes off into the sea, the great, sinister hulking sheds of BAE Systems, where Britain’s dwindling nuclear submarine fleet is constructed and maintained.

The ‘energy coast’ they are calling it now, the west side of the Bay and the west coast of Cumbria. BAE and Sellafield are the big employers around here, joined more recently by the up-and-comers, wind energy in particular. Stand on the dunes at Walney Island off Barrow and look out to sea, and the horizon is filled by wind turbines bigger, and in greater number, than you thought wind turbines could ever be.  Never mind the cosy green fantasies about ‘human-scale’ renewable energy: this is the future and, like the past, it is breathtakingly vast in its ambition and its engineering. Walney is the world’s largest offshore wind farm. Maybe it will bring tourists as well as electricity. Maybe it will save us; and how we need to believe that.

But none of this has really tamed the Bay. All of this human energy happens around its fringes, and although parts of the shore have been reclaimed from the sea and turned over to the farmers, the expanse of sand and wind and water remains wild still. Not that people don’t try to put their stamp on it. For a century or so there has been talk about building a bridge across the Bay, from Heysham or Morecambe to Barrow. At around twelve miles long, the Morecambe Bay Bridge, if it ever got off the drawing board, would be one of the longest in the world. As Barrow’s economy continues to slide, demands for its construction, with all the usual attached promises of job creation and ‘regeneration’, have grown louder, though not loud enough to give the local Build Duddon and Morecambe Bridges Party more than 400 votes at the last general election. In line with the times, the latest proposal is for a bridge lined with wind turbines, which would also act as a tidal barrage, drawing energy from the Bay. If such a beast were ever built, it would change, perhaps destroy, the character of the Bay for ever. The advocates of ‘sustainability’, with a rich irony, would have succeeded where the old extractive industries failed.

Between the estuaries of the Kent and the Leven, protruding from the north of the Bay like a crooked finger, is Humphrey Head, a slightly otherworldly limestone outcrop which features the only cliffs on this coast. Climb up Humphrey Head on a winter or spring day and walk across its limestone pavements, between the storm-bent trees.  The place has quite a different feel to the low sand shores that make up most of the Bay. At the foot of the cliffs here is a trickle of water; all that remains of a once holy well. People once walked here from across the north of England to take the water, which was said to have therapeutic properties. Button-backed miners would come all the way from the Durham pits, bringing their hope with them.

There is a story about Humphrey Head, though it is a story that is told about many other places too. The story is that here, in the 1390s, the last wolf in England was killed by a contingent of local men, who pursued it with pikes and trapped it in the limestone bluffs. I choose to believe this, because the story fits the place so well, and because it suits me to think that the elimination of one of the last great mammals in Britain, the severing of one of our links with our own wild past, at least happened in a place – a rare place now – where wildness still means something.

There are no wolves today, and nobody drinks from the well, but there is something both wild and therapeutic about Humphrey Head still. On a clear day, standing on the limestone pavement, you can see the Bay laid out before you like a map. But it’s better when the sun has gone and the clag has descended as if the past has returned. On a misty day you can be here again with the last of the wolves while the gulls circle around you, dimming in and out of the clouds like spectres, and the oystercatchers pipe under the cliffs and the sands continue to shift and the waters flow from the holy well, and the untameable Bay goes on around you, its great engine turning over still with the years and the tides.