A Cartmel Peninsula Round & The Perilous Past of Morecambe Bay

The Cartmel Peninsula with its ring of outlying Wainwrights boasts a landscape rich in contrast, but ever close are the perilous sands of Morecambe Bay. In the mid 19th century, they claimed 23 lives in just 11 years . I mark the summer solstice with a 24 mile round and recount the victims’ stories.

In 2020, lockdown did me an immense favour. It woke me up to where I live. With the mountains out of bounds, I grew to appreciate what was right on my doorstep, and when restrictions were sufficiently slackened, I began to explore the Cartmel Peninsula with a new-found fervour. I found a landscape rich in contrast: open fell, woodland, grazing pasture, salt marsh, limestone pavements, and of course, the expansive watery desert of Morecambe Bay. Even after Mountain Rescue had given the green light, I was slow to return to the high fells—too eager to keep exploring my home turf. The Cartmel Valley, with its ring of outlying Wainwrights, quickly laid claim to my heart. I developed favourite routes and favourite haunts: Dixon Heights, Hampsfell, Humphrey Head, How Barrow, Bigland Tarn, Bigland Barrow, and slowly I kindled a desire to join them all up—a grand 24-mile Cartmel Valley round. What better time to embark on such a long local ramble but the Summer Solstice—the longest day of the year.

I book the day off work and spend the preceding week cursing the weather forecast for predicting thunderstorms. At the eleventh hour, it relents and announces an outlook of dry, settled weather with sunny spells and gentle summer breezes. Ideal.

I leave the house at 6am and follow the road to Low Newton. Opposite Yew Tree Barn Architectural Antiques, a track skirts a farm and follows a right-of-way into a wood. Just past a gate, the path divides, and I take the left fork that climbs through bracken, under hawthorn and crab apple, to open fell. Newton Fell forms a long low spine, which runs from Lindale all the way to Gummer’s How above Windermere. In his book, The Outlying Fells of Lakeland, Wainwright splits it into two, Newton Fell North, Saskills—its true summit—and Newton Fell South, Dixon Heights—its southern tip. He gives short shrift to the part in between. In his day, it was private ground with no rights of way, but this section, Bishop’s Tithe Allotment is now access land, and Wainwright was remiss to dismiss its rugged charm.

Jagged outcrops of lichen-clad rock rise from a green sea of bracken, stippled purple with peals of foxglove bells. From the top, I look northwest to the grey silhouettes of the Coniston Fells, and north to Red Screes, Caudale Moor and the Kentmere Fells. Closer to hand, to the northeast, Whitbarrow Scar rises across the Winster valley, and to the southwest lies Hampsfell. They form part of a ring of low limestone hills into which Newton Fell intrudes, an older imposter, formed of Silurian mudstone. This prominence of sedimentary rock, risen over millennia from the seabed, now overlooks the tidal waters of Morecambe Bay.

The ground drops away abruptly to the col with Dixon Heights. In the hollow nestles Tom Tarn, a watering hole for the goats and fell ponies which graze the grassy slopes beyond. The drystone wall that divides the two enclosures runs right through the middle of the water. Beyond, a grassy ramp affords a passage to the top of Dixon Heights, up slopes stoutly defended on either side by craggy outcrops and dense thickets of hawthorn. The summit is crowned by the ruin of an old tower, known to locals of certain age as The Colour Pole. Old pictures show a tall turret with a flag flying from the top. Its purpose has been lost in the mists of time. Some speculate it was an observatory, though whether for the stars or smugglers in the bay remains open to debate.

I return on the lower path through the wood, fragrant with dog rose and oxeye daisy, follow the road under the dual carriageway and do battle with bramble and nettle down an overgrown bridleway, lined with meadowsweet, then I cross farmland to the foot of Hampsfield Allotment, the lightly wooded slope that leads to the top of Hampsfell. Hampsfell’s crowning glories are its magnificent limestone pavements and its panoramic views of the Lakeland fells, the high Dales fells, and of course the vast expanse of Morecambe Bay. When the tide is out, the silver sands stretch as far as the eye can see in a hypnotic dance of spiralling patterns and glistening reflections.

On the summit stands the Hospice, a squat stone tower, built by Thomas Remington, the vicar of Cartmel in 1834 as a gesture of thanks for the beauty he beheld here daily. Stone steps lead up to the roof and a viewfinder with a key listing the names of all the visible fells. Hampsfell is another Wainwright outlier. Indeed, Wainwright suggests its magnificent views of the mountains make it an ideal destination for the ageing hill walker whose legs can no longer negotiate the higher summits. A place to come and relive past glories. To the south lies a third Wainwright outlier, Humphrey Head, the jutting promontory that forms the southerly tip of the Cartmel Peninsula.

The most direct route is via Allithwaite and a section of the Cumbria Coastal Way, but I shall return along that section before striking westward, so I opt instead to descend beside Eggerslack Wood into Grange-over-Sands, not only because, in Higginsons, the town boasts the finest pie shop known to humanity, but in a walk of contrasts, I want to experience the period charm of its Victorian promenade. In 1857, the coming of the railway saw Grange prosper as popular seaside resort. However, its name dates back to twelfth century and the founding of the priory in neighbouring Cartmel. The monks crushed and burned limestone from the fell for use as a fertiliser and built a grain store for their harvests at Grange. Its name derives from the French for granary.

In Victorian times, the River Kent flowed past the the mile-long Prom, providing a stately contrast to the ornamental gardens that line the civic side, but over the years, it has changed its course, leaving the Promenade bordered by a sprawling expanse of salt marsh, and turning it into the frontline between ordered Edwardian elegance and the encroaching wild. Where the Prom ends, a footpath leads below gardens to Kent’s Bank. En route, formal planting gives way to bindweed and thistle, and a railing and the railway become the dividing line between civilisation and coastal wilderness.

Kent’s Bank Railway Station is the start for Wainwright’s favoured approach to Humphrey Head. He talks of evading the eye of the station master to shin the wall. These days, no such shenanigans are necessary, a gate leads out on to the marsh and wilder terrain. At Kirkhead End, I leave the concrete parapet at the foot of the railway embankment, and step out on to the mudflats, jumping streams and keeping an eye out for the abundant bird life. On this side, Humphrey Head presents wooded gentle slopes, but on the other, an impressive limestone cliff drops abruptly to the beach, the jutting rocks striped yellow with maritime sunburst lichen and blooming with little crops of foliage and wildflowers.

By the outdoor centre, I take a path that leads up over the gentle grassland above the escarpment to the trig point at the summit. Then I descend to the pointy fingers of low rock that run down to the beach. Humphrey Head is famous for being the spot where the last wolf in England was slain (or so local legend maintains). It has also been prized for centuries for its natural spring waters that have long been held to have healing powers and have attracted everyone from Roman legionaries to lead miners from the Northeast. The sun warms the rocks as I sit and gaze across the spawling sands of the Bay.

Until 1974, when they were absorbed into the newly created county of Cumbria, the Cartmel and Barrow Peninsulas were an enclave of Lancashire, known as Lancashire North of the Sands. A county cleft by the tide was reconciled whenever it ebbed, but the exposed sands provided an uncertain passage, imperilled by quicksands and the speed of the incoming tide. Nevertheless, for centuries the Sands were the principal thoroughfare, and a guide was appointed initially by the monks of Cartmel Priory, and later by the Duchy of Lancaster to try and ensure safe crossings.

In 1857, the guide was James Carter. He was on duty from sunrise to sunset and in the habit of remaining later should he be asked. Not that George Ashburner had any intention of troubling Carter on the evening of Friday 30^th May. Why should he? He knew the Sands as well as the Guide and was in the habit of crossing at least three times a week. He even knew of his own ford across the channel. Ashburner was a badger or cadger in local parlance, a cart driver and seller of wares, in Ashburner’s case, these were most likely fish, being as he was in the employ of Mr Benson of Flookburgh, a cart owner and fisherman. Ashburner appeared to be in good spirits when he stopped for a drink in Wilcock’s Kents’ Bank Hotel.  The manager, Thomas Ball would later tell the Coroner that he had observed Ashburner standing with his back to the fireplace, singing a song. He also recalled serving a glass of porter to one of Ashburner’s companion’s, John Bell. The tap room was packed, it being the start of the Whitsun weekend, which was traditionally a time for fairs and hirings in Lancashire towns. Ashburner had arrived from Flookburgh with a party of 12 or 13 young men, many of them labourers in the employ of farms on the Holker estates, like Old Park or Winder Hall. They had engaged Ashburner to drive them to Lancaster to spend Whitsuntide with family or look for new work. The party might have been one more. Mr Cowperthwaite, an iron-founder from Lancaster expressed a wish to join them, but Ball dissuaded him—not that Ball envisioned any danger, but he thought the company unfitting for a gentleman of Cowperthwaite’s years. When asked whether Ashburner was intoxicated, Ball could not say, but another witness, John Pedder described him as not drunk but “sharp fresh”.

Ashburner’s cart left at about 10pm by railway time. This should have given them adequate time to cross to Hest Bank before the tide swept in, but Ashburner made a fatal misjudgement. He appears to have attempted a short cut, which took the cart about three-quarters of a mile below the normal coach route, splashing through the shallows in the direct line of Priest Skear, a notorious blackspot on the Sands, about a mile and half from the coast at Hest Bank.  Here a projecting rock causes an eddy in the water to form a deep hole.

When hats, and boxes and other belongings washed ashore at Morecambe on the Saturday, John Matthias Maudsley, landlord of the Morecambe Hotel, went out in a boat with James Carter and Robert Cockin.  At Priest Skear, they found the overturned cart, the drowned horse, and the bodies of seven of the young men lying in close proximity. An eighth lay 400 or 500 yards away. Others were later discovered further up the coast. In the absence of more specific evidence, the Coroner returned a verdict of “Found drowned”.

Some papers suggested Asburner set off too late, but this appears to have been a confusion of railway time with local farmhouse time. Until the mid-1800’s, British towns kept their own time based on local sunrise and sunset times, but the advent of the railways necessitated standardisation, and by 1857 most public clocks were set to railway time (although this would not become law for another 23 years). The stopped watches of the victims were set to local farm-house time, however, which was about half an hour or so later. Ironically, the coming of the railway to Grange and Ulverston in 1857 made crossing the Sands by coach largely redundant, but the trains came just too late to avert what was, until then, the Bay’s biggest tragedy.

After a paddle in the shallows beneath the colourful cliffs, I follow a section of the Cumbria Coastal Way to Allithwaite and pick it up again beyond Templand and Birkby Hall. This section boasts a leafy canopy bathing the wide track in dappled sunlight. It cuts through the Holker Estate, beside fields that would have been worked by some of the victims of the 1857 drowning. Young men like Thomas Hardman, Thomas Robinson, Henry Parkinson, Richard Houghton, and John Williams. I leave the track and take a faint path that climbs to the summit of How Barrow and rest awhile, looking back over the valley and the Bay.

From here, the view of the Sands is of the western stretch than separates the Cartmel Peninsula from the Barrow Peninsula. Prior to the railways, travellers from Lancaster to Ulverston would have to make a second perilous crossing over this section. Just eleven years before Ashburner’s fatal journey, this stretch of the Bay claimed its own tragedy, which is remarkably similar in detail.

On 13^th June, 1846, the Westmorland published this solemn report:

“It’s our painful duty this week to have to record the loss of the greatest number of lives ever remembered upon Ulverston Sands. It appears that the unfortunate persons, nine in number, were returning from Ulverstone fair on Thursday, the 4th instant, in a cart belonging to Thomas Moore, fishmonger and badger, of Flookburgh, and it is reported that he was at the time worse for liquor, and had entrusted the reins to one of the persons in the cart not so well acquainted with the Sands; they, however, got safe over the channel, during the crossing of which they were observed by others following in the same direction, who on a sudden lost sight of them, when it appears they had got into a hole called Black Scarr, and without any alarm whatever having been made, all, as also the horse, had perished. Had the least cry for assistance been made they might have been heard from a great distance, the night being calm but no doubt in a moment all were swamped by the upsetting of the horse and cart.”

Unlike the 1857 tragedy, where the victims were itinerant labourers, hailing from a variety of Lancashire and Westmorland towns, all nine victims of the earlier disaster were from the neighbouring villages Flookburgh and Cartmel. Their joint funeral and burial in Cartmel churchyard drew a crowd of 1200 to 1500, on what must have been a bitterly sad day for the parish.

I follow the spine to Spiel Bank, where I again pick up a section of the Cumbria Coastal Way. It takes me up through High Stribers Wood to Bigland Heights and the tranquil elegance of Bigland Tarn. From here, I make my way to the final Wainwright outlier—the panoramic viewpoint of Bigland Barrow. It has been a journey rich in visual contrast: pastoral valley, wild salt marsh, open fell, period seaside elegance, and distant mountain drama; but the one constant has been the expansive view over the shimmering, spiralling sands of the Bay, a beguiling but deadly muddy bronze desert.

Further Reading

Many thanks to Raymond Greenhow for pointing me in the direction of the two Bay tragedy stories. Raymond’s own Scafell Hike website is a rich source of local history and well worth a visit:

https://scafellhike.blogspot.com/

Sadly, in 2004 the Sands were to claim twenty three more victims in another very dark day for the area. I’ve written about that here:

This Is The Sea