Out and about – around the Lancashire Coast

Bank End, Cockerham

They have installed a new parking meter, and spy cameras at Glasson Basin. There are two things to note about that. (1) The price to park has gone up, and (2) I found the meter impossible to understand. But help was on hand from the younger generation, and we muddled through. The important thing is we’re here, the walk having been postponed from February.

It’s good to be in Glasson again, though I was saddened by that parking thing, and the hike in tariffs, as it’s not exactly the Lakes or the Dales. Yes, there is an understated charm about the place, but this new parkomat seems to rather overstate its virtues. It will of course be something of a cash-cow, as the days warm, and the weekend crowds return.

But for now, it’s a cold morning, and there’s a steady breeze off the water, with razor blades in it. There’s an in-and-out sun, but a mostly gloomy sky. The forecast is for dry until mid-afternoon. Then a band of rain and sleet is set to sweep up from the south, but we should be on our way home by then.

There’s a forlorn look to the few barges moored on the canal, as we walk by on this first leg of our journey. Indeed, they puncture any bubble of romance one might have had about living off grid, and on the water. They look rusty, damp and cold. Some vessels have also moved out of the vicinity of the basin and are now moored much further down the canal, as if shunned from the port’s environs. There is trouble afoot here. The sleepy look of Glasson belies recent tensions with the port authority, who appear to be asserting themselves over the local residents, and in ways that aren’t at all popular.

Glasson Basin

From the canal, we take the little lanes south, through the meadows, towards Thursland Hill. In doing so, we pass the Morecambe R/C aeroplane club who are putting their little machines through their paces. There is also the steady drone of a Pilatus as it takes off from the skydiving centre where, for as little as £150, you too can throw yourself from an aeroplane.

The vast meadows around Thursland Hill are dotted with itinerant swans today. They are the biggest of our birds, and so common a sight on our lakes and waterways, we take them for granted. I think they look better on the water than off it. Off it, there is also a lumbering menace about them. Beyond the meadows, beyond the swans, in the far distance, the shaggy Bowland fells are dusted with snow.

Beyond Thursland Hill, the scenery shifts from cultivated plain, to coastal marsh. I’ve said before how the Victorians took the most attractive bit of the Lancashire coast and built the screaming fun metropolis of Blackpool on it. At least that’s Blackpool’s front of house. For the rest, it is the most deprived town in the North. I’m sure there are other towns who can argue they are worse off, but it’s not exactly a competition we should relish, and speaks volumes instead to the times.

This bit of the coast is untamable, and therein lies both its charm and its salvation. However, even here, much of what we see is shaped by sheep, reared for the salt marsh lamb, and for which Bank End farm is famous. As in much of the Lake District, they crop the shaggy grasses and give a fresh mown appearance, which is pleasant, but unnatural. There are a couple of benches by the farm here for weary pilgrims to rest their bones. I choose one for lunch. On the other sits a man with a telescope and a notebook, spotting birds out on the marsh. We exchange greetings. He seems a quiet type, has with him a quiet, companionable dog. I don’t like to disturb them, so we share the view in easy silence.

It’s around noon, and the incoming tide is beginning to fill the vast network of dendritic channels which are patrolled by shrilly piping oystercatchers. There are eagle-eyed cormorants, too, statue-still, waiting for incoming fish. There is a lone egret, and further out, by their thousands, all huddled together, on a slowly vanishing sandbank, there are dunlin. That’s the extent of my knowledge of coastal birds, but I bet the other guy has spotted dozens more. If there is any healthy diversity in the natural world, it is at the liminal zones like these, where human reach is limited. Elsewhere is ruin.

The light is strange, today. I want to say it is gloomy, but there’s an occasional glow to it, like something sunny and revelatory is wanting to press through. The moments are fleeting, and we let the camera make of them what it can. As we walk, I’m worried about Jansen Pool, which is coming up on the latter part of our meander. It’s a tidal channel, through which our path passes, and is sometimes submerged. There is no viable alternative, other than a long back-track, or acrobatics involving a farm gate and slippery planks. I have checked the tides, and we’re looking at five meters today, around mid-afternoon. The problems only arise at the spring tides, and we are several days past the moon’s full. We should be okay then, but I am no Salty Sam, and have been caught out before. That’s for later, but adds a certain spice of anticipation as we make our way up the coastal trail to Cockersands.

The Chapter House, Cockersand Abbey

We try a couple of fresh perspectives here. One is of the Chapter House, the sole remains of the Abbey, and a grade 1 listed building. It’s a perspective I’ve copied by researching other photographers’ takes on it, though we seem to have captured today’s fleeting light and moody sky. Then, turning to face the sea, there is also a striking view of the Plover Scar lighthouse and an altogether different mood. It has a kissing gate at land’s end for foreground interest. The lighthouse looks rusty and ancient, even though it was only recently rebuilt after a ship collided with it. Beyond the light, we have the wide reach of Morecambe Bay, and a snow speckled Black Coombe.

The Plover Scar Light

I check the phone, on which I run the navigation app, to confirm the distance still to go. I have forgotten to turn the data off, so a notification has leaked through and informs me there will be no pundits on Match of the Day, tonight. I’m not a fan of football, and haven’t watched Match of the Day for donkey’s years. But this is about much more than football.

The lead presenter is a popular celebrity, with a huge Twitter-base. He has said something derogatory, but essentially true, about the government’s refugee policies and the BBC have suspended him for his candour. His colleagues have now also withdrawn their labours, quoting “solidarity”. This is not the sort of word one usually hears among the astronomically well paid, but welcome all the same.

It is a serious matter for the BBC who appears to have caved in, and very publicly, to political pressure. It damages their reputation as an impartial public service broadcaster, and is to be regretted. But it is a reputation already in question on account of their chairman being a significant donor to the Conservative party. I don’t see this playing out at all well. But I note also the media fuss is over the man, rather than the policy, which is widely, and internationally condemned.

I fear all of this means the next few years will be a hateful time, as more cultural issues are stoked for their incandescent effects on public opinion. Indeed, we’re going to hear a lot about who we should hate or fear, as a distraction from more pressing issues. Those damned bloggers for a start, perhaps, those bleeding heart amateur hacks, bleating on like they know what they’re talking about. But we should remember that, while the populists claim to be defending us against bogey-persons of their own invention, our futures are being dismantled brick by brick, freedom by freedom, doctor by doctor, nurse by nurse, and ambulance call by ambulance call,…

Tidal flooding at Jansen Pool

Anyway,… Jansen Pool is passable with a mere splash of the boots, unlike in the photo, taken on a previous occasion and which required acrobatics. Then we’re up the final pasture, where the thorn trees make dramatic shapes against a glowering sky. And, finally we return to Glasson, to the shimmering basin, and the simmering discontent of its locals, to its eclectic moorings, and its shiny new parkomat. Here, we call at the Lock-keeper’s rest for chips, and a brew. There’s always a handful of garrulous hairy bikers here, with their thundering machines. It’s a good run out on a bike, or in a little blue car with the top down. But we’re in the big grey one today, anticipating this band of weather, and wary of salty roads for fear they might dissolve the little blue car’s undersides. The big grey one ran well, was powerful and comfortable. It’ll be taking us some distance in the coming year.

As we’re served our chips, the skies darken, and the rain comes on. It’s gentle, just the lightest kiss, but with flecks of sleet in it. In a world of few certainties, it’s comforting to know you can at least still rely on the factual impartiality of the Met office.

Six and a half miles, dead flat.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/53.9856/-2.8384&layers=C

Read Full Post »

A much anticipated walk – interrupted.

As we come up to the last Friday of February, I find myself reminiscing. In 2014, I took the Friday off and drove up to the old port of Glasson, on the Lancashire coast. I was driving what I used to call at times a slab grey commuter mule, at other times just “Old Grumpy”, an ’07 plate Astra which seemed to have become an extension of my being. We were both showing our age, in terms of miles on the clock. The commute, around fifty miles a day along some of the worst roads in the North West, was burning us both out. I was making plans to retire before the decade was done, and I still had fuel in the tank. I was within a shout of making it. Sadly, the same could not be said for old grumpy.

Beside me, on the waterfront, this old guy had just pulled up in a red MGB. He was wearing what looked like an Irvin flying jacket, and was clearly living some sort of Spitfire dream. I looked at that MGB and I wondered if a part of me wasn’t still missing the wreck of an MG roadster I’d given up, aged eighteen, (A) because the car had tried to kill me and (B) because I couldn’t afford the insurance, or the repairs.

2014 seems the blink of an eye, but it’s eight years and a lot of water under the bridge.

Glasson that day was more than just the drive out, of course. It was a walk down to the coast at Cockerham, then back along the coastal way. It was the biggest breakfast I’d ever put away, at Lantern O’er Lune. It was a bright, frosty morning, and spring bulbs. It was the glimpse of another way to be. It was a light at the end of the tunnel. And it was that red MGB.

Fast-forward a year to the last Friday of February 2015, and I’d bought an old Japanese roadster, spent the summer in love with it. It was no MGB, but then, for all their cult status, I’d never really rated them, mechanically. We abandoned the open-top roadster market to the Japanese in the late seventies, and in return they’d given us the infinitely superior MX5.

I’d driven to the upper Wharfe and back in it, top down all the way, and all manner of other little trips that had lit me up. There was something about getting to places in that car that was an altogether shinier and more optimistic experience than driving old Grumpy. This is hard to explain, if you’re not a motor-head, and it seemed, in the long process of growing up, I’d forgotten that I was. Most cars nowadays, in spite of the marketing, are no more than appliances, designed to be driven by people who can’t really drive, people who obsess more over the computer screen, and a car’s ability to wash its own reversing camera, than how it feels on the turn. The MX5 is spartan by comparison. It’s all clicky-turny knobs, and not a push button in sight. Such inexpensive roadsters are becoming rare, even on the second hand market, but if you’re lucky enough to find one, you discover once more the pleasures to be had in the up and the downshift, and all the little things between the A to B that still make driving a buzz.

I still have that car, still enjoy knocking about in it. It has a feel like no other vehicle I’ve ever driven. It fits like a glove, is responsive, and foot-sure, and reminds me a man should never fully grow up, that dreams – even Spitfire dreams – are nothing to be ashamed of. It costs a small fortune every year in repairs, and always has some niggle or another, but we’re a good match, and I measure its expected longevity, its aches and pains, as I measure my own. Neither of us will be around forever, but while we are, we’re going to have some fun. She’ll be a classic by the time I croak, maybe even of the same rank as that old MGB, then my kids can sell her on to some boy racer with more money than sense, and split the proceeds.

Anyway, I was looking forward to getting her out this week, fuelling up in readiness for another run to Glasson, but I’m still testing positive for damned COVID. So, it looks like the last Friday of February 2023 is going to be another dud, all of them since 2020 scuppered by COVID. Instead, I shall clean and oil the walking boots in anticipation of brighter days, and a negative test.

For now, here’s a video to remind me of the 2015 run.

And this is where I would have walked, had the walk not been interrupted.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/53.9851/-2.8471&layers=C

Read Full Post »

From the ruins of this place?

Someone else’s MGB, Glasson Marina, February 2014

The last Friday of February, this year, was also a full moon, thus seeming especially auspicious. Previous years would have had me and the small blue car at Glasson Marina, enjoying the year’s first hints of spring. From Glasson, I like to walk the quiet lanes to Cockerham, then back up the Lancashire coastal way, over the green sward, by the remains of the abbey, and the Plover Scar light. I’d have lunch at Lantern O’er Lune, then return home via the garden centre at Barton, for coffee and cake. A grand day out, as they say.

I first did that trip in 2014 in an old grey commuter mule called Grumpy. I’ve done it every year since, except last, and this. On that first trip there was a guy at the marina in a gorgeous red MGB. He looked to be in his seventies, living the dream, with his Irvine flying jacket. At £850 a go, that jacket was as much of a statement as the car. Cynics might have said he was menopausal. But in your seventies? Not likely. Okay, he looked a bit eccentric, but the guy had spirit, and he inspired me. The next year I was in the small blue car, an old but reasonably well-kept Mazda roadster. All right, she’s no MG but, forgive me, I never held the same faith in British motor cars as others. I’d thought to keep the car a year or so, get her out of my system, and sell her on, but we’re still together. I drew the line at an Irvin jacket.

My MX5, Glasson Marina, 2015

This pandemic year however, the car is under covers, and I keep my steps local. On Friday, I walked a pleasant circuit from my doorstep, instead, just clipping the next village. I was hoping to see a particular buzzard, thus scotching rumours the bird had been shot. I didn’t see it. As I walked I was thinking of Glasson. I was picturing the crocuses in the churchyard, and along the canal bank. I was also thinking about writing, and the answer to a question I’d posed: Why have I not decided upon so much as an opening sentence of new fiction yet, months after putting up my last novel? I have never been without a work of fiction for company. But time is ticking.

Things are pretty well upended, was the answer to my question. You’ve had a big change of circumstance, what with early retirement and everything, so let it ride, don’t rush it. And fair enough, I’m not. I’ve bought a 3D printer to tinker with, and I’m designing and building bits and bobs for myself. I’ve made a clock case, a watch case, and some quick-release clips for stashing Alpine poles to my rucksack. Ironic, I thought. For most of my life I have been writing as a distraction from the trials of engineering. Then I retire, and I take on personal engineering projects as a distraction from writing. I am, if nothing else, perverse. But the answer goes further, deeper. It takes in the ruins of the world, and how best to move on from them.

I understand that in one sense I’m in a good place. A final salary pension helps enormously, but most of all I’m lacking anger. However, I’m also lacking passion, which is possibly less good. I look upon the corruption of political high office, and I don’t care any more. I read how the cost of BREXIT is now roughly the same as our contributions to the EC since 1972, and I don’t care. The Labour Party is veering once more to the right, purging itself of even moderate old lefties like me, and I don’t care. I’m fine, I want everyone else to be fine too, but I’m waking up to the nature of the world as being one of ineradicable inequality, indifference and self-entitlement. Money makes you mean, and since money buys power, you can plot your course from there to the most logical outcome – which is pretty much the ruins of where we are.

The Taoist texts talk of clarity. They use the image of a lake. If we are emotionally aroused, they say, it’s like the perturbation of the surface, and the stirring of sediment. Then we cannot see through to the bottom of things. Only through calmness, through stillness, does the sediment settle out and clarity is restored. But while in stillness, there might indeed be a kind of clarity, I find there’s not the energy to power a hundred thousand words of fiction. It strikes me therefore, I might have already written my final novel. On the one hand I’m surprised by that, since I’d always imagined my retirement as a time I could spend writing to my heart’s content. On the other hand, again, I don’t care. The muse has been slipping me the occasional idea, but I can tell she’s not serious. She has not once lit the blue touch-paper. All of which perhaps goes to show the Universe is not without a wry sense of humour.

Then, as I write, my son brings news of a pair of buzzards circling my garden. He’s rummaging in some excitement for the binoculars. It’s an unusual sight, a pair of them like that, and a bit of a shock, actually. I break off for a photograph, snap-on the long lens. I’ve been stalking buzzards in my locale for a while now, trying to get a nice sharp image of one, while lamenting their vulnerability, and suddenly there are two over my house, as if they had come to look at me and pose. It’s surely an omen. Of what, who can say? Light or dark, we take our choice. Myself, I’m optimistic. It seems you don’t always need to venture far in seeking what you want, also that we needn’t go chasing every shadow. Indeed, perhaps what we seek is actually seeking us, and all we have to do is find sufficient stillness of mind to let it in.

Glasson, on the last Friday of February 2022? The small blue car will be twenty years old.

It’s a date.

One of a pair of buzzards, circling over my house

Read Full Post »

The last Friday of February – 2019

Small blue car, Glasson Basin

It was unseasonably warm, this, the last Friday of February, temperatures nudging seventeen degrees and a spring tide almost cutting off the village of Glasson. The little blue car and I are here again for our annual groundhog day. I first came in 2014, but that morning was a cold day, a winter’s day, and there was ice on the car park. Today was summery, balmy and weird. There have been years when I didn’t get the top down until April. That’s natural, today wasn’t.

I’m dressed for winter, five sensible layers and a hat. I have binoculars, camera and a Lion Bar. The plan is the same as always: walk south across boggy meadows to Cockerham Marsh, then pick up the Lancashire coastal way which leads us back to Glasson, then a brew before we paste it back home.

I’m not feeling too good, a bit of a cold breaking, so my head is woolly and there’s a fatigue hanging over me, but I’ll manage. Yes, the weather is weird, and I’m tying my coat around my waist before we’ve gone a mile, but the warmth in it is undeniably cheering. A few weeks ago we had snow.

Bank End, Cockerham

Cockerham Marsh never fails to impress, one of Lancashire’s jewels – the glittering expanse of it, the greenness and the dendritic channels all patiently fished and swooped over by oystercatcher and curlew. There were murmurations of dunlin and starling too, animating a sky lit generously by a low winter sun, and with all the warmth of spring in it. I’m thrilled by the rapture of birds here as they wade and gambol out of reach of man. As I watch I find myself wondering if, when we’ve poisoned ourselves from the last corners of the planet, the birds will find a way to survive and preserve in themselves what is truly beautiful about the world.

And then it’s the coastal path and the green sward by the old abbey where the land stops and tumbles sedately into the sea, then the call of lambs in sheep-thick meadows, and the final push up a summer-sleepy Marsh Lane to Glasson. All of this in February.

The Lancashire Coastal way, Cockerham

I get a brew at the Lock Keeper’s Rest, by Glasson Basin, settle on a bench in the sun, among the born-again bikers. I’m joined by an old dude who tells me it’s a shame they closed the pub. He speaks with the direct intimacy of an old friend. He’s just lonely for a chat, I suppose. He goes on to complain about the salt water he’s had to drive through on the way into Glasson, as if it’s someone’s fault, and how it’s no good for a car. Then it’s the price of a pint and a football ticket, his opinion amply expressed by a weary shake of the head. I ask him how long since they closed the pub, not that I’m interested, but it looks like he’s settling in and thus far it’s been a bit one-way. He seems not to understand the question, bites his lip and looks at me askance, as if I’ve offended him and he bumbles off to sit alone.

On the drive home there’s a near accident on the humped bridge over the canal at Garstang, a learner driver is approaching it cautiously, but then caught unawares by an insane hardcore wagon which appears suddenly, rising like Poseidon from the deep and steaming over the bridge at full tilt. The wagon screeches to a halt, inches from disaster, sends up a cloud of dust and is unable to move unless the learner reverses, but the learner is frozen with shock, as am I.

The hardcore driver is not a patient sort and is effing and blinding at once. The passenger gets out, the learner hastily slides over. The hardcore man continues to sully the air with foul and insulting language: You can’t drive, you’re an idiot, you shouldn’t be on the road – that sort of thing.

“Learning, mate,” says the passenger, hands wide, in a placatory tone, then points out the L plates. You know? Cut us some slack. Be patient.

But the hardcore man takes this as a challenge to his superiority. The cab door is flung open, and a tense standoff ensues. The queue for the bridge is dozens of vehicles deep in both directions by now, but we must all await the pleasure of the hardcore troll, captive audience to his vile strutting. Does he commit assault on an innocent man? mangle his car for good measure and expect us all to applaud him? The learner car backs up as quickly as possible in order to avoid fisticuffs. The hardcore man, still puffed up hurls parting curses, then thunders away to wreak havoc elsewhere.

I follow the L plate into Garstang, thinking to myself the learner will probably never want to get behind the wheel of a car again, scarred for life by an ill timed encounter with the troll. A troubling day of sorts then, mostly beautiful, but in a weird sort of way, overlaid by something surreal, courtesy of my being under the weather, and there’s an aftertaste of threat that’s been hard to shake – the un-seasonal weather suggestive of climate catastrophe, and the latter incident indicative of an increasing and vociferous intolerance among our people.

The principal threat to the natural world of course has always been the human being which seems incapable of acting in harmony with it, while the biggest existential threat to the human being, apart from an asteroid impact, has always been human beings themselves, and their propensity to act first in preservation of their own misguided sense of superiority, to the detriment of more altruistic virtues.

Anyway, mind how you go and beware of those thundering hardcore wagons.

Read Full Post »

The last Friday of February

 

The last Friday of February is the one that usually kicks off my year, and for the past four years I’ve been travelling to the little Lancashire port of Glasson to walk the same section of the coastal way from Bank End Farm, on the spectacular Cockerham Marsh. There’s an element of groundhog day to this outing, underlined by the uncanny similarity of the weather on each occasion – temperature just above freezing, clear skies, wintry sun , and a light but bitterly cold wind blowing in off the sea. Today is no exception, but there’s a difference in the air, a subtle nuance – call it imagination, call it superstition, but I have a feeling this run is coming to a close now, that next year will be different. It has to be. Everything must change if it is to remain true, and whatever does not change cannot be true, thus I’m picking up an element of fantasy to the day which, although pleasant enough, cannot be entirely trusted.

The Mazda was reluctant after a very cold few weeks in the garage, and very little exercise over winter, the engine catching only at the last minute as the battery faded to nothing. Then the ABS warning light remained on throughout the outward journey – brakes were fine, so most likely a problem with the anti-lock sensor. It’s a thing with Mazdas. There’s also a grand’s worth of repairs necessary to her bodywork if I decide to keep her beyond this year. I have the sense she’s reminding me of her mortality. It’s all fixable but she’s a second car, not my main driver, and all of this seems a bit extravagant and unnecessary, especially in the current oppressively austere zeitgeist. It’s a pity because I love the car like no other I’ve owned, and we’ve had some fun, but she’s sixteen years old now, coming up on ninety thousand, and she isn’t going to last for ever. That’s just another fantasy.

Still, for all of our antiquity, we pick up a tail on the way, a Mercedes SLK, brand new. This happens a lot. Last time, as I recall, it was a Maserati. These supercars growl up close, like predatory animals, glue themselves aggressively to the bumper, then, at the first opportunity pull out wide and disappear in a cloud of dust and noise, and all in order to prove their willy is bigger than mine. Now the Mazda is a lively little thing, but the sense of her is mostly internal. She’s also worth next to nothing. That she attracts such attention is laughable, not flattering, and do I really want us to go on being the foil for this particular kind of conspicuous consumption?

The Mazda sighs impatiently at such class-warriorish ruminations, rattles up to Glasson and deposits us on the carpark at the marina. Here we leave her to admire the view, the basin running like burnished silver this morning, boats nodding at their moorings. We tog up and set out on the familiar way, first of all calling in Glasson’s gorgeous canal-side Parish Church to admire the spill of light through stained glass, and to see if there are any good second hand books for sale on the stall at the back. Today there are none that take my fancy, so on we go.

The walk first takes us south across sodden meadows as far as the lush fractal patterned marsh at Cockerham, from where we pick up the coastal way. Winter wet has left the meadows heavy, and they are slow to drain. Migratory swans pepper the green sward, settling there to rest, and forage. They are not gregarious birds and spread themselves out into introspective, moody dots of white, their grumpy honking a reminder to steer clear. We pick up the more cheerful sound of waders down on the marsh, mostly Oyster Catchers and Curlew piping. There’s a Plover doing acrobatics across the emerald meadow, pee-witting as it goes, and then as we cross the causeway we are treated to the most astonishing display – a vast murmuration of starlings rises from its roost around the farm and swirls a living spiral in the air.

Unlike other birds en-mass which we tend to view from afar, Starlings are an easier treat for the photographer performing it would seem for our pleasure at much closer range, and quite exhilarating . It’s a whirring buzzing chattering shriek of a thing, a pointed cloud swooping and soaring like a single living entity, drawn into strange, pulsing patterns and made entirely of tens of thousands of birds. I am so astonished that by the time I remember the camera, I manage only the weakest of shots as the birds move north.

The Plover scar light, broken last year after being struck by a ship, is now repaired and looking like new. I try a few shots but the light is suddenly flat and I need a longer lens to do it justice. And the narrow passage across Jansen Pool, where I nearly had to swim in order to complete the walk last year, is now repaired so the path can be followed without risk to dignity. Then there’s just the last long quagmire of Marsh lane and its ancient line of hawthorns, twisted into fantastic wind-blasted shapes, and we’re back – another completed round of Glasson and Cockerham, on the last Friday of February.

It remains only for us to take lunch in the Lantern o-er Lune, from whose brightly lit interior we shelter from the biting wind, and pretend it is a summer’s day. Tasty Cumberland Sausage Panini and a gorgeous salad soothes our lunchtime cravings. Over coffee we gaze out at the water, and we contemplate this particularly lovely and ancient part of Lancashire. Meanwhile the Mazda catches the sun. She looks ever so lovely out there, even shaded and lined as she is by the mud and salt of winter.

Okay, so here’s what we’ll do: We’ll get the ABS repaired first, then see if she’ll squeeze through the MOT into next year without the bodywork doing. It’s a good call, and she rewards us by putting out the ABS light on the way home.

Who says living magically makes no sense?

Read Full Post »

The Last Friday of February – Eye of the Storm

Doris they called it, the storm I mean. We caught the scythe edge of it on Thursday as it advanced across the North, laid the grass flat and rippling in shivery silver waves. It pulled down trees and masonry too. It was looking a bit doubtful for my trip to Glasson Marina then, this last Friday of February. It would have made it four years in a row and on each occasion enjoying the harbingers of spring – soft sunshine, snowdrops and crocuses, and hares gambolling in the lush green meadows between Glasson and Cockerham.

Ah, well.

But come Friday Doris has moved her quietly watchful eye over the North, blessed us now with a brief, eerie calm, and several hours of clear blue. So, I wake the Mazda from her hibernation, and we head up the M6 to Lancaster, and Glasson.

The ticket machine at the marina is broken. It always is. There’s a number to ring so you can pay to park your car by phone but the number is broken too. It was broken last time, I recall. It’s only a pound all day , and I don’t begrudge it. I want to pay, but there is not the means of doing so. So, I tie on my boots, put on my winter layers and set off amid a gnawing anxiety about returning to find the Mazda slapped with a cunningly constructed penalty notice – this happens every time – the anxiety I mean, not the penalty notice.

I’m a little spooked by this weather. Four years in a row, this day has repeated itself, weather and all, this annual pilgrimage to the port of Glasson. It’s not a groundhog experience – more complicated than that. I live my life as normal all year, but on this one day, the last Friday of February, I step back into the same day, like an eternal recurrence.

On this occasion, I am also on a mission. Last year, just along the coast here, I’d found a smooth-worn piece of standstone. Unremarkable you might say except this stone had once been part of the Abbey, long since demolished and recycled into the sea defences. It granted the stone a certain intangible, esoteric value and I’d made a promise with the abbey’s ghosts – I’ll take this home for luck, because its shape pleases me, I’ll keep it on my desk, turning it meditatively as I ponder my muse, then I’ll return it to the sea a year from now.

So here we are again. Same day, somehow slipped out of time – even a storm abated to make way, so I can keep my promise.

From the Marina we head out along the canal to the first bridge, pausing a while at the Christ’s Church, glowing in the the early morning sun, and we admire its displays of snowdrops and crocuses. Then from the bridge, we have a bit of quiet road walking, narrow lanes, south, before taking to the first of the boggy meadow paths, this one by Thursland hill fishery, and eventually out onto the causeway at Cockerham marsh.

It’s all wide blue sky and impossibly green meadows here, a pair of swans in one, stark white against the green, a pair of hares at play in another. There’s something neat and, compartmentalised about this, something symbolic, dreamlike even, and then,…our first impediment to progress, our first challenge: a gate, tied up with a tangle of wire and made so as not to be undone.

It makes me question my memory, my confidence, for sure the path leads through here? The map says yes, but there’s no way this gate is going to open, and all alternative routes lead astray. Something symbolic here also, I think. So I climb the gate and, not for the last time today, make good my course.

Gaining the causeway at Cockerham Marsh, I’m in time to see a Pilatus Turbo Porter, belonging to the Black Knights skydiving centre, hauling itself aloft with a penetrating buzz that vibrates in my skull. This is new to me. They have not flown on previous incarnations of this day.

Later, as I walk the causeway a couple of red chutes blossom in the blue. Men float to the ground, legs akimbo, wobbling. Their rate of descent looks faster than I’d be comfortable with. I’m reminded a man was killed here in 2012 when his chute didn’t open. It’s a sobering thought – a popular charity challenge, but leaping from a plane is no joke, and clearly not without its dangers, which I suppose is the attraction.

Anyway,…

It’s a gorgeous morning on the marsh – the tide is out, waders a plenty by the sparkling waterline – a mix of dunlin mostly, some curlew and the occasional splash of darting colour, and the shrill piping of oyster-catchers. These are the birds I can name, many I cannot. I kick against a curious piece of brass just along the way here, hear its metallic jingle underfoot. Curious, I pick it up.

What the Hell?

It’s a knuckleduster, perfect fit too, but as I squeeze it into my fist, I feel a jarring of something unpleasant, imagine it smashing into someone’s jaw in a drunken brawl, blood, a spill of teeth, torn flesh. What foolishness and folly – the worst of mankind encapsulated in this one dumb object.

They are illegal to carry, and to sell in the UK, but not to own – one avoids prosecution I presume by not being caught with it in one’s possession. I don’t know what to do with it. If I drop it back onto the path, it’s there for the next passer by to chance upon it. And so what? I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel right, feel safe, so I slip it into my pocket for now, some possibly misguided sense of protection. I’ll have to think about it.

Across a vast, green, sea-scented sward I approach the Chapter House of the Abbey now, but what draws my eye is the Plover Scar Light, just off shore, or rather its absence from the receding tide. It was a rusty old thing, quaint, its architecture not quite of this world and having the look of something too long at sea without paint. And it’s mostly gone now, its stonework laid out methodically ashore, its foundations on the scar overlaid with an exoskeleton of scaffolding. A ship struck it some months ago, dealt it a mortal blow, but engineers are undertaking a painstaking restoration. It was always a beautiful subject for the camera – just Google Plover Scar Light for a sample. I shall have to wait for my next incarnation, next year, to get my picture.

Near the old Lighthouse cottage I return
that smooth-worn piece of the abbey to the sea, keep my mysterious pact with the spirits of place. But it’s an ignominious ceremony overseen by a farmer shooting shit into the meadow across a fence, trundling slow with a giant tank of malodorous slurry. I’m upwind, so it doesn’t bother me, but I sit a while anyway, let him get on, not wanting to follow too close.

So,… the knuckleduster. It’s much pitted and spoiled by weather, but serviceable enough  and not beyond restoration – there are some  who have a morbid fascination for such things. I should take it home and saw it up perhaps? Take it out of circulation. But it feels like a contamination in my pocket, a really bad vibe, bad Karma rising from it like the stench of that slurry now. So how about I throw it into the sea? But might the sea not throw it back, come the next storm, for other hands to find?

It’s about six miles round and back to Glasson. But at five miles I come upon my second impediment to progress ,and this one more serious. It’s a gate that lets on to a section of path that is now submerged by flooding. Someone has laid a precarious looking plank across the gap. The water beyond the gate, under that plank is waist deep and very, very cold. It gives me pause, but the alternative is several miles of backtracking.

I accept the challenge -something bloody minded in my attitude to risk this morning – I mean if people can leap from aeroplanes,… So, I stride out over several feet of water, onto the first bar of the semi-submerged gate, climb the gate, descend to balance on the plank on the other side. Then it’s a deep breath and a couple of steps to the dry land, the plank bending under my weight as I go, so the water comes within inches of overtopping my boots. But I make it over with dry feet.

As a marked track, the Lancashire coastal way is not without its spice!

Finally it’s back along the canal with it’s colourful barges, their chimneys now smoking cosily, and to Glasson Basin where the Mazda basks in the sun, awaiting its long run home. There’s no penalty notice stuck to the windscreen. Glasson keeps its pact with me, as I kept my pact with the ghosts of the abbey. And that knuckleduster? Let’s just say I lost it along the way, lost it somewhere safe where no one,  will ever find it again and from where the sea can never toss it back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

Around Glasson Dock and Cockersands Abbey

A change in working practices has ushered in a new and unfamiliar flexitime regime. Not everyone is happy with it. Change is hard, but so far as I can work out, it now means the fifteen or twenty minutes I used to work beyond my contracted hours, for nothing, are now automatically totted up by the clocking machine. Minutes make hours and hours make days, and once a month the machine tells me I’m due day off. I’m therefore more than happy to embrace the new. Indeed  this is nothing short of a miracle and I’m enjoying it while I can before what I can only describe as a significant managerial blunder is discovered and flexitime scrapped post haste. Anyway, thus it was on Friday morning, I found myself nosing through someone else’s commute and heading north on the M61 for pleasure, instead of south for dollars. And all this without digging into my holiday ration!

A forty minute run took me to Glasson Dock, a small harbour on the Lancashire coast, tucked up and away in the estuary of the Lune. This is an area of mud banks and salt marsh. The Victorians picked the only decent stretch of beach hereabouts and built Blackpool on it while the rest remains an untamed morass rich in cockles and birdlife. My parents would bring me to Glasson when I was a child and I’d never tire of it, the marina presenting an ever changing carnival of vessels, large and small, from the sleek to the eccentric. It hasn’t changed much in forty years, and is still a popular picnic spot for day-trippers.

I remember the old Manx ferry King Orry coming aground here in the winter storms of ’76. A fine looking boat, and quite a spectacle throughout that year as attempts were made to float her off again. Strange things happen here – a boat was sunk in the dock when I arrived – and there’s a sense that Glasson is such a temporal anomaly it shouldn’t exist at all in the modern downsized post industrial world. Yet exist it does – indeed it appears to be thriving. It has the feel of a smugglers port too – stories of illicit cigarettes and other drugs coming ashore here, or so the papers say. It’s difficult of access by sea with a narrow, snaking, shifting navigation channel but this hasn’t prevented a busy trade in grain and fertiliser, with scrap and broken bottles going out for recycling to the Continent, also coals to the Isle of Man.

Landscape wise, this is as lowland as you can get – salt-marsh with the occasional plug of clay on which the ancients built their farmsteads and waited out the seasonal floods. Bleak is a word that comes to mind, but the mild late February sun that morning painted Glasson with a smile. I needed a change, and today was the day. I’d even ditched my usual fluorescent mountain jacket and rucksack – changed them for a more traditional waxed jacket, with voluminous pockets for my kit. A flat cap completed the farmer Giles look. I sense a change in me – the way I dress is a harbinger of something else, coming back to a self perhaps who is at the same time much younger and yet so much older than I am now. But whoever he is seems companionable enough. The theme for the day was “amble at our leisure” and neither of us argued about it.

Waxed jackets are a bit old fashioned now, modelled on what is essentially a nineteenth century oiled-cloth technology, they won’t take anywhere near the same kind of soaking that even a cheap modern waterproof will withstand with ease. They also have an image problem, being associated with the four by fours and green wellies of the county set. But I like them for lowland rambles – they’re comfortable and naturally breathable without a lot of high tech gobbledeygook. They last well, too. I’ve only recently binned my thirty year old Barbour after finally discovering it in a mouldy knot in the boot of my car. I replaced it with a much cheaper make, but one with plenty of pockets for camera, bins and map.

The map was instantly to hand on my ‘droid – a bad idea in the mountains and much frowned upon by the rescue teams, but permissible here, I thought. People have come to grief in the hills because their phones go flat and they’ve no paper back ups. We’re also tending to rely on GPS for telling us where we are, and the fear is that as the generations pass, our map-reading skills are going to perish and we’ll effectively be clueless without batteries. Used wisely though, the technology is helpful – no need to second guess where that right of way leaves the road and skirts someone’s property. No need to wonder how far you are away from base. A glance at the phone and x-marks the spot, and the GPS tracker always has the map homed in at the right bit for you – no need to go flipping through pages and pages of it to find yourself. It amazes me that even five years ago, this technology was beyond the means of the masses. Now it’s every day. But make sure you have a paper back up.

The walk took me from the marina basin down a short length of the Lancaster canal, past the parish church, to the first bridge, where I picked up the quiet country lanes that took me south – School Lane, Jeremy Lane and Moss lane. A mile or so of road walking then led to the first of the squelchy meadow paths, skirting the little coarse fishery at Thursland hill, then further south, the way heavy going now across increasingly soggy meadows and along muddy, tractor weary green lanes. A dogged persistence pays off though and we finally emerge on the coast, overlooking the impressive salt marshes of Cockerham.

The paths hereabouts, though not exactly overused, are all fairly well marked, which is always a good indication of how welcome you are as a stranger. By contrast I was brought up in an area where footpath signs tended to disappear overnight and where landowners were insensitive to a people’s need for green.

The salt marsh at Cockerham was a revelation – a wide open sky, miles of mud and a tranquil sea reflecting a soft yellow sun. It also reminded me of a line in a song by Kate Bush; something about the sky being full of birds. This was my first sight of the sea in a long time, and a refreshing picture it made too. We’d had heavy rains which, coupled with spring tides, had left the place with a drenched look. The tide was sneaking in again now, and all manner of waders were settling down for an incoming bounty. I counted oystercatchers, and curlews among the ones I knew, plus a million others in gay variety, making me wish I was more of a twitcher so I could have named them all.

On the downside this stretch of coast sees a lot of trash washed up – all manner of gaudy plastic, caught up by the sea, and a good deal of it hurled over the flood banks by recent storms. You could patrol this coast every day and fill a truck with it and the next tide would wash up even more – a seemingly never ending bounty of human detritus.

From Cockerham my route picked up the Lancashire coastal way, which keeps to the shoreline for a couple of miles as far as Marsh Lane, then cuts back inland and leads us home to Glasson. There are a few secret caravan parks along the coast here, tucked in behind the defences – snug weekend bolt-holes, but looking vulnerable to tide and weather, I thought – also washing up their own flotsam of empty bottles of cheap booze. One of the most impressive bits of the walk was the section of lush green meadow that sweeps down to the sea and which was the former site of Cockersands abbey.

In artistic terms, the scene here loses its profusion of details, becomes much simpler – almost abstract – a vast plane of green, then the sea, and a pale, clear sky. In human terms I feel we take on a greater significance in such a landscape by virtue of our mere visibility upon the land – no longer hidden among the corners and the brickways and byways of the built environment. There was certainly an exhilarating feels to this section, excepting the bit where the farmer was spraying slurry – but then anosmia has its advantages, leaving me serene in contemplation of the view, when others might have been gagging for air.

The abbey’s mostly gone now, levelled but for the forlorn little chapter house which by some strange quirk of fate remains in a state of almost perfect preservation. The tens of thousands of distinctive red sandstone blocks from which the abbey was constructed, back in the 1100’s, have been recycled over the centuries, into the flood defences. You can easily pick them out as you walk along, standing out from the concrete of more modern times. It seems the blocks that once protected this part of England from the tides of Biblical of sin, still provide service today, helping to keep out the sea. Indeed the impression I have is that much of the farmland hereabouts is merely on loan. The sea could take it back any time it wants.

Throughout the walk, away from the lanes, the meadow ways were soft with rains, and the going heavy. Seven miles had left my feet rather weary, so I was glad to see Glasson again come lunch-time. And lunch, at the Lantern O’er Lune cafe, was the biggest all-day-breakfast I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of demolishing. What with that, a decent walk and some much need sea air, it was all I could do to keep my eyes open on the drive home.

I was later found asleep, mid afternoon, passed out in the conservatory at home, basking in warm sun and sweet dreams.

I can’t think of a better way to spend a Friday.

Flexi time rules okay!

Here’s a map of my route.

Read Full Post »