The suburb of Skerton, on the north side of Skerton Bridge, leads to the hamlet of Slyne, perched on a hill overlooking Morecambe Bay. The place-name “Slyne” looks as unpleasant in print as do the personal names of Silas, Matthias, or Jabez, and the meaning of it, as of the similar place-names “Slindon” and “Slinfold,” in Sussex, seems to have escaped research. A quaint old manor-house, now a farm, with an odd doorway inscribed

G
C M
1681,

stands facing the road, and with the old “Cross Keys” inn, dated 1727, comprises nearly all there is of Slyne. Here comes the left-hand turning to Hest Bank, on the shore of Morecambe Bay, whence old travellers, greatly daring, took a short cut across the treacherous quicksands at low water, to Grange and Cartmel, instead of going the roundabout way of Carnforth and Milnthorpe. Lancashire is here cleft into two separate and distinct portions, Lonsdale south of the sands, and Lonsdale north; a great wedge of Westmorland coming in between.

The geography of the district surrounding Lancaster is by no means simple. It is a country bordering upon the sea, which here and there advances into the land, in the shapes of great sandy bays and long, tongue-like estuaries of short but turbulent rivers that, taking their origin as mountain-torrents amid the gloomy heights of the eternal hills and mountains of Lakeland, have their sudden moods, dictated by the melting of the snows, and by rain-storms. The distant landscape in the neighbourhood of Lancaster is always closed in by mountain heights, and the flat shores of Morecambe Bay look the more flat, and the far-off fells appear the more rugged, in these several contrasts.

A considerable number of these little rivers come pouring down from the Lakes to the sea: the Lune, the Kent, the Keer, the Winster, the Leven, the Crake, and the Duddon. The road on to Kendal and Carlisle avoids all the estuaries, and goes uneventfully onwards; but travellers who wished to pass expeditiously between Lancaster, Furness, and Ulverston had no choice but to make their perilous way “Over Sands,” across the inner bight of Morecambe Bay, at low tide. The alternative was the unwelcome, and anciently the dangerous, one of going the extravagantly long way round by Milnthorpe, Crosthwaite, and Newby Bridge, under Whitbarrow, where the treacherous Mosses, almost as dangerous as the sands of the seashore, spread, and where the lawless and desperate cattle-reivers lurked. Confronted with these problems, old-time wayfarers generally chose the sands.

The story of “Lancaster Sands,” as they are often called, is romantic and melancholy. The hazardous crossing was made between Hest Bank and Kent’s Bank, a distance of eleven miles, over a wet sandy waste that is twelve feet deep in sea-water, at high tide. In these days of railway travel, and since 1864, when the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway was opened, the Over-Sands route is less frequently used, and principally by farmers’ carts and by inquisitive tourists; but in all the earlier centuries it was necessary, and great pains were taken to ensure, so far as might humanly be, the safety of travellers across.

The sands are first mentioned by Tacitus, in his history of the second campaign waged by Agricola against the Western Brigantes, the tribes inhabiting Furness and the northern detached district of Lancashire now known as North Lonsdale. The Romans, with their usual combined thoroughness and prudence, appear to have made causeways crossing the estuaries of the Kent, the Leven, and the Duddon, considerably inshore from the exposed Over-Sands route and somewhat on the route of the present railway bridges; but traces of their handiwork are now very few.

The next historical reference is not met with until 1325, when the Abbot of Furness petitioned the King that his jurisdiction might be extended in this district, to comprehend the Leven Sands, which were so dangerous that many travellers, sixteen on one occasion, and six on another, had been overtaken by the tide, and drowned. His petition was granted, and the Abbot established, on an island half-way across the estuary, a little chapel in which the monks prayed all round the twenty-four hours for the safety, or for the souls, as the case might be, of those who sought to cross. It is, however, scarce to be supposed that the Abbey privileges would have been thus extended had the aid to travellers been merely that of prayers. A more practical note was the addition of a lighthouse, or beacon tower, to the chapel, combined with the readiness of the monks to guide strangers. Since 1820, the guide across Leven Sands has received an annual salary of £22 from the Duchy of Lancaster, with a grant of three acres of land. He enjoys, in addition, under the provisions of the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway Act of 1851, a further £20 a year, in compensation for loss of fees caused by the opening of the railway; for although he is a public official, he commonly received gifts and free-will fees from those he guided across in pre-railway days.

The more lengthy journey, from Hest Bank to Kent’s Bank, was under the especial care of the Priory of Cartmel, which from an early period maintained an official guide who was paid out of a grant made to the Priory from Peter’s Pence for the especial purpose of performing this public service. Travellers here also had the benefit of the monks’ prayers, which in truth they often needed.

This very necessary office of guide did by no means fall into decay with the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry the Eighth. Provision was made by the expenses being charged to the Duchy of Lancaster: “the Carter over the Kent,” as the guide was called, being paid £20 per annum by the Receiver-General, and the guide across the shorter passage of the Keer being paid £10. The Carter no doubt performed his duty, but the Sands every now and then claimed their victims. Thus, in the registers of Cartmel may be read the following tragical entries:

“1576, Sept. 12. One young man buryed, which was drowned in the brodwater.”

“1582, Aug. 1, was buryed a son of Leonard Rollinson, of Furness Fell, drowned at the Grainge, the 28th daye of July.”

“1610, Feb. 4, John ffell, son of Augustine, of Birkbie, drowned on Conysed Sands.”

“1630, Aug. 10, Wm. Best, gent., drowned on Melthorp Sands.”

The registers of Cartmel alone testify to over 120 persons having lost their lives while crossing the channels of these treacherous shores.

The race of secular guides across the Kent began, after the surrender of Cartmel Priory, with Thomas Tempest. Son succeeded father in the office, but they seem soon afterwards to have become Carters; probably having adopted the name from their official title.

The poet Gray, touring the Lake Country in 1769, relates a pathetic story of a family overtaken by the mists half-way across the Sands: “An old fisherman told me, in his dialect, a moving story, how a brother of the trade—a cockler, as he styled him—driving a little cart with his two daughters (women grown) in it, and his wife on horseback following, set out one day to cross the Sands, as they had been frequently used to do (for nobody in the village knew them better than the old man did). When they were about half-way over, a thick fog rose, and as they advanced they found the water much deeper than they expected. The old man was puzzled. He stopped, and said he would go a little way to find some mark he was acquainted with. They stayed awhile for him, but in vain. They called aloud, but no reply. At last the young women pressed their mother to think where they were, and go on. She would not leave the place. She wandered about, forlorn and amazed. She would not quit her horse and get into the cart with them. They determined, after much time wasted, to turn back, and gave themselves up to the guidance of their horses. The elder woman was soon washed off, and perished. The girls clung close to their cart, and the horse, sometimes wading and sometimes swimming, brought them back to land alive, but senseless with terror and distress, and unable for many days to give an account of themselves. The bodies of the parents were found the next ebb, that of the father a very few paces distant from the spot where he had left them.”

The story is still remembered how, in the days when coaches crossed Grange Sands at low water, an outside passenger lost his portmanteau and excitedly jumped down after it, becoming half-engulfed in the treacherous quicksands. He would probably have perished, had the guard, used to the place, not come to his rescue, and pulled him out, with a resounding “cluck,” similar to the noise made when drawing a cork.

But a more serious affair was that of 1811, when the Over-Sands coach, the Lancaster stage, was overturned in the Kent Channel, through the horses turning restive. They brought the coach to a stop, and the current washing away the sand under the wheels of one side, the whole affair turned completely over. It was very nearly a tragedy, for there were fifteen passengers, inside and out, flung floundering in the sand and water at a very dangerous place. A young lady, floating on voluminous clothes down the Channel, was grabbed by the guard, and the passengers huddled together on the side of the overturned coach; but all the loose luggage was swept away and lost, and two pointer dogs were drowned. The passengers were brought to land on the backs of the coach-horses, the last being taken off none too soon; for the coach was gradually sinking, and was eventually completely engulfed in the sands.

A narrow escape was that of Major Bigland, who was crossing one dark evening in his gig from Lancaster, intending to reach Cartmel. He drove towards the sea instead, and only by extreme good fortune managed to land near Conishead. A post-chaise was lost and the postboy and one of the horses drowned near Hest Bank in 1821, and in 1825 the Lancaster coach was blown over, midway, and a horse drowned. The passengers were only with difficulty saved. In 1832 the identical coach was sunk in a quicksand. Much later, in 1846, nine merry holiday-makers, returning from the Whitsun fair at Ulverston, drove into a treacherous spot near Black Scar, on the Leven Sands, and were all immediately drowned: and a similar disaster occurred to a party of seven farm-hands crossing the Kent Sands to Lancaster in 1857, the year the Furness Railway was opened, and the Over-Sands coach discontinued. In every case, the bodies were easily found; lending point to the grim story told of an ancient mariner who, asked if guides were ever lost on the sands, answered with simplicity: “I never knew any lost. There’s one or two drowned, now and again, but they’re generally found when the tide goes out.”

About 1785 a coach was started between Ulverston and Lancaster, going daily across the sands. The scene at its crossing was curious. The Carter, on horseback, headed it, and in its wake generally followed a number of carts and other country vehicles, forming a procession not unlike an Eastern caravan crossing the deserts of Arabia. The Carter’s guidance was absolutely necessary, for although the track might at every ebb be beaten out by a multitude, the incoming tide inevitably obliterated every trace of it, and the channels were constantly shifting. A contemporary account says: “The Carter seems a cheerful and pleasant fellow. He wore a rough great-coat and a pair of jack-boots, and was mounted on a good horse, which appeared to have been up to the ribs in water. When we came to him, he recommended us to wait till the arrival of the coach, which was nearly a mile distant, as the tide would then be gone further out. When the coach came up, we took the water in procession, and crossed two channels in one of which the water was up to the horses’ bellies. The coach passed over without the least difficulty, being drawn by fine, tall horses. Arrived at the other side, the Carter received our gratuities and we rode on, keeping close to a line of rods which have been planted in the sands to indicate the track. The channel is seldom two days together in the same place. You may make the chart one day, and before the ink is dry it will have shifted.”

A sufficient testimony to the dangers of the sands is found in the fact that those who have known them best have ever been the ones to most dread them and the “cruel crawling tide” that with the shifting of the wind can readily change from a crawl to a hissing seething gallop across the perilous flats.

The proper time to attempt the crossing is five hours after high water, but even then only in fine weather. A strong sea-breeze will bring the flood in, fully an hour before the tide-tables; while after heavy rains the crossing is impossible, owing to the flood-water from the rivers permeating the sands in every direction and converting the whole route into one vast quicksand. Never at any time should the stranger attempt the passage without competent assistance.

The dangers of the Lancashire coast were illustrated once more at the very moment of these lines being written, in the inquest held, September 1907, on John Richardson, a farm-labourer who was engulfed in the quicksands at Broadfleet Bridge, Pilling, near Garstang. While walking on the sands, he sank to the waist, and being far from any human habitation, his cries could not be heard; with the result that he met a fearful death by slow drowning, as the cruel tide crept up across the lonely shore.

Turner’s picture of the coach crossing the sands is dramatic, but nothing in the way of drama is enacted there now. It is a grey and sullen scene. On the skyline to the left is the tall ugly tower at Morecambe, and dimly on the right the mountains of Lakeland. The London and North-Western Railway runs along the shore, at its Hest Bank station cutting off proper access, and only by the rarest chance is the Over-Sands route now taken.