Deciding on where to go for my walk today led me to decide that actually, I’d better do another prom walk if I want a chance of finishing in twenty weeks. So I did. It was around 4 pm when Darren dropped me at the Heysham end of the prom, and despite being after school and a Friday, it was lovely and quiet. Most of the children’s play areas were empty or only had one family, and the prom itself had a few cyclists and dog walkers, but for the whole walk it was quiet – and I enjoyed it.

I can’t actually say what the tide has been like on my other walks – well, I could if I went to look at the photos, but – it didn’t really impinge on my thoughts, but today one of the first things I thought was ‘Oh, tide’s out’ and then I remembered the plaques in the prom that I would walk past at the Heysham end, and decided that today I’d write about the tide and the bay. The plaques contain different facts, some about the tides and some about the history of the prom and the history of Morecambe. These ones, that have details about the amount of water in the Bay are always astounding to me. Twenty million years to fill the bay from a bath tap, and yet the tide does it twice a day. I find that breathtaking. At our biggest tides, the spring tide, it would take ten days for one tide to flow over Niagra falls. Just scroll down through these pictures, and realise how much water is about to flow back into the Bay. (And please do, this post continues…)

It really is no wonder that Morecambe Bay has a reputation for being dangerous. The amount of water and the speed it comes in at are quite something. And that is before the channels. The bay and the beach aren’t flat. There are shallow and deep channels running all over, some of which are quite close to land. There are also deceptive patches that are higher than the surrounding beach and mean that unsuspecting people can suddenly find themselves cut off on a sandbank they didn’t realise they were on. That’s before we get onto the question of quicksand – and yes, while it may not be the major life problem we imagined it could be as children, quicksand exists and it exists in Morecambe Bay, with both sand and mud having suddenly soft and clinging patches that combined with fast tides can be dangerous. Of course, this is also one of the reasons why the Bay is such an important wildlife habitat.

These people are a vital service in the Bay – and we have both an RNLI Lifeboat and Hovercraft.

There are less serious things about the Bay as well. In the West End of Morecambe is this memorial to Commander Charles Gerald Forsberg OBE RN. You’ve probably never heard of him, but he was an open-water, long-distance swimmer who not only set a cross-channel record at age 45, and two weeks later won the Windermere Championship as the eldest in the field. He was president of loads of open water and long-distance swimming things, he won countless swims, but importantly for us was the first person to do a two-way swim of the Bay as well as actually swimming the Bay 29 times. The links in this paragraph take you to various pages about him and will open in new tabs. He was also according to one of them, married to a Morecambe woman.

I know there is an open water swimming group that swims in the Bay from Morecambe, but I don’t know if anyone has done swims of the Bay – I can’t imagine it. Crossing the Bay used to be the way to travel. Centuries ago the walk or carriage/horseback ride all the way around the various rivers that flow into the Bay was extremely long, but to cross the sands cut the distance to about a quarter (about 40 miles to about 10). There are clues that the Romans used the crossing, and until the reformation, the local abbeys of Cartmel and Connishead amongst others would appoint guides. After that, it was the monarch as Duke of Lancaster who appointed guides. Guides were necessary because the channels move through the year and over the years. I was remembering today that it must be 27 years since I did the cross-bay walk, I know that when I did it we were wondering if I was pregnant or not, I was, just, with my eldest who is 26. That was on one of the May bank holidays. On looking to find a reference for the distances I found this link that has lots of old paintings and descriptions of crossing Morecambe Bay, as well as the information that it was not the turnpike road that stopped the regular stagecoach crossings, but the coming of the railway which goes across from Arnside.

So, today’s Prom Walk, the 5th was a ‘Tide’s Out’ walk. I wonder what the next one will be. I have ideas, food, art, sunsets, play, history, and buildings…but so far I’ve not set out walking with an idea in mind, I’ve just waited to see what occurred to me at the time. I felt a lot better after today’s walk than I did after the last one. It might be because I had the wind behind me, and it was windy (Photo below!) It might be because it was much quieter and cooler. It might be because I had a massage on my bad neck, shoulder, and back yesterday. It could be because I went Heysham to Hest Bank, so the adverse camber at the Hest Bank end meant I finished with the bit that seems to make me ache rather than start with it. Somehow I seem to have done an extra few hundredths of a mile as well since I ended on 4.73 rather than 4.65!

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