Places: The Place

I've spent the afternoon down at Mawbray, the great bank of sand-dunes between Allonby & Silloth, a Cumbrian place unknown to tourists. The dunes conceal the foundations of a Roman milecastle, one of the line of fortifications that went south-west along the coast from the end of Hadrian's Wall. On their windward side there's a line of five cottages just on the beach, with small-holding allotments, lines of washing waving in the wind, and ponies grazing on the green. In high summer when there's a hot sun and a cool wind off the sea, it feels as if you've wandered onto the location of a neo-realist movie. I'm always half-expecting Monica Vitti to stagger out of the dunes and poutingly demand to be swept away to Ravenna and made love to in a revolutionary manner.
No such luck today, so I walked out over the sands and realised I'd had the good fortune to arrive at low tide. The banks and shoals stretch out for several miles to the low water mark and are a public fishery as well as some sort of oddly defined heritage site. The first great swathe of sands are hard and flat: locals bring their sand-buggies here in the evening, lethally fast karts powered by dirigible kites that the driver steers from his seat. Further on, I met a jolly Geordie fisherman and his spaniel, plunged elbow deep in water, feeling for crabs beneath a stranded boulder. His mate was driving a quad-bike half a mile distant, gathering sacks of cockles. They'd been here two weeks, he told me: the cockles were business, the crabs - a whole half-barrel of them - for their supper. The spaniel looked pleased. Further north, there's a line of tree-stumps poking out of the sands, a remnant of who-knows-what Mesolithic forest. Far beyond this, two miles out, you walk over a final bank of hard dry sand, and see navigation buoys pitched askew in the shallow waters of low tide. Lift up your eyes and Scotland is enormously close: you've walked a quarter of the way there - ahead there lies a final deep shelf down to the low water mark, and beyond it the shoals of Robin Rigg, the Blackshaw Bank and Barnhourie, sands whose names echo from the tales that my grandfather the lifeboatman told me. Turn around and you're rewarded with a view of Skiddaw, Helvellyn, Grasmoor and the western fells that nobody ever sees because closer to shore they're obscured by Mootah and Tallentire Hill, at this distance reduced to low ridges dwarfed by the mountains beyond. Look along the waterline and you realise, your sight attuned to the nuances of the plane, that the sands are anything but flat: the banks rise tens of feet in a mile, blocking out the distant horizon. It's just as well that they do, for this is no Morecambe Sands with its fierce tide-races, and even at the turn it's still possible to walk the two or three miles back to the shore, and terra firma, where I'm writing these lines.