Snippets 10: stone stoops

The iron bracket hints at the old stoop’s former purpose

Gateposts don’t normally attract our attention, so it is easy to miss the fact that many of the ‘posts’ supporting field gates on the Solway Plain are not posts at all, but are the traditional red sandstone pillars – known as ‘stoops’. Aged by the weather, streaked with rust, their bright colour dimmed by pale encrusting lichen, they book-end wooden or metal gates – or, rusty brackets the only hints of earlier purpose, empty spaces. They were set in the ground at a time when farm-machinery smaller, but as tractors and combines have ballooned in size, so these field openings have often become too narrow for access; stoops have been broken or removed, replaced with wood or concrete posts that are atypical of the landscape and not aesthetically pleasing.

One of the ‘heritage landscape’ projects of the Solway Wetlands Landscape Partnership has been to commission new stoops and reinstate these traditional features of the Solway landscape.

With the help of the Solway Coast AONB, the Solway Wetlands team identified potential sites for replacement and, Chris Spencer, the Project Manager, told me, “landowners were approached with the offer of replacing missing or wooden or concrete gateposts with the sandstone stoops”.

Twenty pairs of stoops were ordered from the Cumbrian Stone company in Penrith. The pink stone, glistening with quartz particles, is typical of the Penrith red sandstones, ‘aeolian’ sandstone, formed by in wind-blown dunes, and was quarried from Bowscar Quarry to the North of Penrith (1) and subsequently cut, shaped and carved by masons at Cumbrian Stone before being delivered to the RSPB’s Campfield Reserve near Bowness-on-Solway.

Waiting stoops

W for Wetlands

 

Here, on a windy and bitterly cold day in March, people gathered for a ‘stone-carving workshop’ arranged by SWLP under the guidance of stone-carver Tom Baron, who showed participants how to mark out and then cut the outlines of the herons that were to be carved on the two stoops for the Reserve.

 

The stone-carver’s tools

Tom Baron pricks out the heron design

Tom Baron carving

 

Later in the year, holes were dug and the stoops installed, with the help of Dinsdale Moorland Services (2), in gateways around the Solway Plain. Local blacksmiths produced the bands to enable the gates to be hung.

 

Chris Spencer, Solway Wetlands’ Project Manager – with one set of stoops in place

There are new stoops at one of the entrances to Natural England’s Glasson Moss, and on field-gates near Bowness and next to the line of the old canal and railway at Glasson. All twenty pairs can be seen from the roads or public footpaths – so look out for these handsome and functional traditional structures, each engraved with a distinctive ‘W’.

“I spy with my little eye, something beginning with S” …

Near Bowness

At RSPB Campfield Reserve

Glasson Moss

 

(1) Bowscar Quarry stone

(2) Dinsdale Moorland Services also helped restore part of Natural England’s Glasson Moss

The Solway viaduct

The Solway is as smooth as silk, the water slipping in around the embankment that points a stubby finger towards Scotland.

We have reached the embankment’s distal end by stepping and teetering along the sloping wall of dressed red sandstone blocks – St Bees’ stone, mica flecks glinting – that fit neatly together and, where they have been disturbed, reveal an infill of sandstone rubble. Out at the point, storm-driven waves have destroyed the embankment’s integrity; blocks lie tumbled and shattered – and a line of rusty cast-iron pillars is all that remains of the Bowness end of the Solway railway viaduct.

It is more than 80 years since the viaduct and its railway were dismantled, and little remains to show the embankment’s former purpose. Now, its upper surface is hidden by a scarcely-penetrable tangle of grasses, bushes, gorse and bramble; below this thicket, the red sandstone appears ancient, aged by whitish-grey patterns of lichen, but then it grows youthful once more, fresh and rosy, where it’s been exfoliated by the friction of the waves. Green algae, thin intestinal sheets, skirt the lower edge where it touches the sandy shore.

The landward end of the embankment

Nearing the northern end

A hole in the structure

Worked red sandstone

A hundred years ago, we might have heard the chuff-ing of an approaching train, and the rumble and rattle of wagons crossing the iron bridge, swathed in smoke, but today, the hottest day of the year, the only sound is the gentle sussuration of the incoming tide.

***

The viaduct was part of the Solway Junction Railway (SJR) that ran from Brayton, via the Abbeytown and Kirkbride Junctions, to Kirtlebridge in Scotland.

Aston & Barrie’s 1932 map, Wikimedia Commons

By Afterbrunel Wikimedia Commons

(The diagram by AfterBrunel is licensed for use under Wikimedia Commons)

The railway historian Peter Burgess writes in 1950 on his informative Cumbria Railways website that one of his readers has a medallion that was struck “To commemorate the cutting of the first sod. Solway Junction Railway at Annan, by Wm Ewart Esq. MP 28th of March, 1865”

Between then and 1869, when the viaduct was officially opened, barges carried building materials to the site: perhaps the stone for the Scottish and English embankments was brought by rail and road. Where was the stone quarried? In which country were the pieces of wrought-iron and cast-iron made? I try to imagine the activity on land and out in the Firth, the different craftsmen – seamen, stonemasons and metal-workers – the thudding of the pile-driver, the hammering, the shouting, the sounds of the sea and the wind. For nearly four years, that region of the Upper Solway, the villages, the pubs, the roads and marshes – the wildlife – must have been transformed.

As for the viaduct itself, it “was effectively a trestle construction with 193 spans of 30 feet; each pier consisted of five cast iron columns of hollow section, 12 inches diameter; the outer columns were raked, acting as buttresses to the three inner load-bearing columns. The columns were founded on iron tubular piles that were driven by a steam pile driver, after an unsuccessful attempt to screw them in to the substrate.” (Wikipedia)

James Brunlees’ engineering diagram, from Grace’s Guide

John Howes, in his typewritten document,  talks about the viaduct being “one of the greatest engineering feats of the day.” Quantities, measurements, are quoted lovingly in all the articles about the bridge: “.. a sea embankment 440 yards long on the English side, and one of 154 yards on the Scottish, which gave the foundations of the 1,954 yards-long bridge. The track was 34 feet above the sea level [mean high water?] supported by a pillar every 30 feet, whilst cast-iron used amounted to 2,900 tons together with 1,800 tons of wrought iron.”

The engineer responsible for ‘one of the greatest feats’ was James Brunlees (1816-1892), who also designed the Morecambe Bay crossing and the docks at Whitehaven. Brunlees’ career is a delightful story of serendipity and determination. His father was gardener and steward for Mr Innes, the Duke of Roxburgh’s agent in Kelso and, according to one of Brunlees’ obituary writers in 1892, intended his son to become a landscape gardener. However, the surveyor Alexander Adie, who was working on the estate, allowed James to help him, and “the useful assistance he rendered that gentleman was acknowledged by the presentation of a theodolite” with which James subsequently “in the summer evenings” made a plan of the farm. Innes was so impressed that he asked James to survey the Duke’s property. Eventually, he was able to attend classes at Edinburgh University, after which Adie appointed him as his assistant – and with new appointments and continued study, Brunlees became a well-known railway and maritime engineer, twice President of the Institution of Civil Engineers and knighted in 1886.

The viaduct from Bowness

From Annan

(These images are from the excellent website, Solway Plain Past & Present, of the Holme Cultram History group)

The crossing over the Solway was opened to freight in 1869 – from September three freight trains ran each way every day, and a passenger service started the following year.

The purpose of the SJR was to transport iron ore, haematite, from the West Cumberland mines, directly to foundries in Lanarkshire and Ayrshire, avoiding the long dog-leg to Carlisle.

The wrangling between the various railway companies who feared a loss of freight business – the Caledonian, the Maryport and Carlisle, the Glasgow & Southwestern – about the proposed SJR was protracted and too complicated to discuss here.

Sadly, the income from the transport of iron ore didn’t live up to expectations; in 1873 the SJR, by then in debt, sold the Scottish side of the line to Caledonian. By the mid-1870s cheap Spanish iron ore was being imported directly to ports in Ayrshire and income fell even further.

***

As airline pilot Mark Vanhoenacker explains so lucidly in Skyfaring, his aerial, four-dimensional view of our planet is strongly dominated by water, in all its liquid, frozen and particulate forms. So too is the character of the Solway Firth and its fringes: the sea and its tides, the rivers and estuaries, the bands of fog, the Mosses and the glittering jigsaws of the saltmarshes.

Bowness and distant embankment

A watery place

(images from my gyroplane flight)

Forms of this wateriness caused delays and the final downfall – literally – of the Solway viaduct.

Although by 1869 freight trains could pass along the whole SJR, and passengers were permitted between Kirtlebridge and Annan, passenger traffic to Bowness was delayed until March 1870. It was the sogginess of Bowness Moss that had caused the problem. The SJR’s Directors reported to a shareholders meeting in Westminster in October 1879,

“unexpected delays …prevented the earlier opening of the line, particularly those in connexion with the crossing of the Bowness Moss.   … Additional works had been required on the Moss, but the difficulties of this part of the work were now mastered. …  It had been considered advisable to postpone the opening for passenger traffic until the line over the Moss had been thoroughly consolidated by the running of goods and mineral traffic over it. The report of Mr. J. BRUNLEES, the engineer, stated that during the past half year continued attention had been given to the drainage of Bowness Moss, and it was now so far consolidated that the passing of loads had very little effect on it. He had reported some time ago that the goods and mineral traffic might be conducted with safety at a moderate speed, and with engines of medium weight.”

According to John Howes, it had been “necessary [on Rogersceugh Moss] to sink bundles of wood, or faggots, into the marsh in order that a firm bed might be provided” .

***

On that hot, humid day, we left our bikes in the green, shady lonnin that marked the southern corner of Bowness Common and the RSPB’s Reserve, and walked along the track that divided boggy, re-wetted Moss from heathery carr. In search of longer, wider views we were heading for Rogersceugh Farm (pronounced Roger-scuff), built on a view-point above the Moss, on the whale-back of a drumlin.

Flies buzzed in clouds, clegs lurked and settled; there were wild raspberries to eat, and splashes of scarlet Robin’s Pincushion parasitising the wild rose stems. And then a chance encounter, of the sort that I’ve come to expect and hope for round the Firth: men out on the heather, heaving a thin rod out of the peat and upwards to the sky.

Peat-coring

Peat-corers. They had just reached the clay, they said, at 5.5 metres; they were surveying the depth of peat each side of the track, because the farm buildings had been sold, and the route of the track might be changed. ‘It’s a bad day for clegs,’ one of them said.

 

It is said that when the track for the railway was built across the Moss, the workers had to cut down 50 feet to find a solid substrate.

Further on, cattle stood in fields each side of the track. A red car appeared, reversed and stopped. A small, white-haired woman got out and walked to a fence, stood talking to the beasts who came towards her. She smiled at us as we came closer. “Clegs are bad. You’ve got bare legs.”

Another chance encounter: she introduced herself as Dot Harris, former owner of the farm, who had “heard the cattle blaring” and had driven over to see what was wrong. Had we seen the waterlily pond? she asked. There were red and yellow and white flowers. “The farm belanged til Lord Lonsdale so mebbe he had them planted. I did wonder if the ducks had fetched them in…” We mentioned the ‘dismantled railway’ featured on the OS map. “It’s right here, look,” she turned round and pointed at a gated track behind us, now overgrown and barely-distinguishable as the former line. “And you see the concrete there?” – blocks almost buried in nettles and brambles – “there was a hut there for the railway. That concrete was made to last!”

The concrete base of a railway hut?

The line of the railway from Rogersceugh to Whitrigg

We wondered about going across the field to look for the rest of the line, but the cattle were fractious, the ground was boggy, the clegs were bad; it would have to wait for another day.

“Aren’t you scared to walk over the Moss?” she asked. “I would never do it! When I lived here there were adders, hundreds of adders. I was scared stiff of them. When the men came to dig the drains they used to go out in their lunch-break and catch them.”

We said we’d only seen a couple on the Mosses in several years, and later that day a friend from Solway Wetlands group told us he hadn’t seen any this year, even in places where he had formerly reliably found them.

Rogersceugh Farm

Rogersceugh Farm

The lily-pond

As we walked past the derelict and decaying farm, the hot air vibrated with a threatening, rumbling mutter. At each side of another lonnin, out of sight but within smell and sound of each other, two bulls were arguing over who was dominant; seeing us, one turned our way and blared.

The water-lilies were not in flower, although the pond’s surface was obscured by their leaves. The view, of the Northern fells, the wide water-dotted Mosses, the Firth, the Dumfries and Galloway coast and hills, was spectacular. A nearby line of dead birches, bare branches glistening white, marked what was possibly the ‘dismantled railway’, built across the once-deep and soggy peat.

***

Water damaged the viaduct during the winter of 1874/5. It had entered some of the pillars and frozen, its expansion causing the cast-iron to crack. Eleven load-bearing pillars and 20 ‘rakers’ had to be replaced or repaired, and holes were drilled in the pillars above high-water mark to allow condensation to disperse.

More recent ice-floes, Allonby, December 2010 (Photo: Eileen Palmer)

Ice-floes, Allonby. (Photo: Eileen Palmer)

Then, in January 1881, exceptionally cold weather caused the rivers and fringes of the Firth to freeze. When the melt began, huge ice-floes formed and were pushed at speed down the Solway, crashing into and piling up against the viaduct. Initial damage was quickly repaired, but the damage became more severe within the next few days, and on February 4^th the Edinburgh Evening News reported: “The damage to the pillars begins at a distance of 400 yards from the English coast and extends in varying degree to about 100 yards from the Scotch side. … there are altogether 44 entire piers gone, two of them double piers of 10 columns each; and other pillars have been broken at intervals in other places, making the total number of pillars broken over 300. … there are two complete gaps in the bridge where piers, girders, plates and railway have completely disappeared.”

The viaduct was broken.

Later a report by the Railway Inspectorate (quoted in the Wikipedia article) notes “…when the momentum which would be acquired by a piece of ice twenty-seven yards square and in places six feet thick (the dimensions of one piece actually measured), upon a tide running at ten miles an hour is considered, it is not surprising that cast iron columns twelve inches in diameter, seven-eighths of an inch in thickness, which owing to the long-continued frost were in a very brittle state, were unable to resist the shock.”

After that, the state of the viaduct and the railway fluctuated. The viaduct was repaired, goods and passengers were permitted to cross, the fortunes and finances of the railway companies varied; the First World War saw trains carrying West Cumberland ore and pig-iron from Workington to Clydeside, and supplies to the new Eastrigg munitions works.

Judy McKay’s name is on a cliff at Fleswick Bay, beautifully carved by her stone-mason father James. Her family owned sandstone quarries on the West Cumberland coast and had an arrangement with a quarry at Annan.

James McKay, stonemason (Thanks to Mrs Judy Beeby for this photo)

She told me that her father had learnt some of his craft at Annan, and although the family lived at St Bees’ village, Jim would cycle all the way to Annan, by way of Sandwith to pay the men, then up the coast to West Newton, and finally to Bowness-on-Solway. And then, as she said, “At that time the railway bridge across the Solway was the quickest route to Dumfriesshire, and the railwaymen would allow James to carry his bicycle across the bridge.”

However, by May 1921 the structure was declared so defective and dangerous that Caledonian announced they would no longer use the viaduct. Passage of trains across the Firth was finished.

Thereafter, until it was demolished, its gappy and airy bed, “swaying and clanking in the wind”, was used as a crossing by trespassing pedestrians, especially it is said, men from Scotland who came across to the English pubs on Sundays!

In 1934, “Arnott  Young & Co.of Glasgow, who had purchased the whole system, began demolition work on the Viaduct; and so firm did they find the old structure that a considerable amount of blasting was necessary, in spite of its having been condemned as unsafe some 13 years ago” (John Howes‘ document )

***

At the Bowness end

At the Whitrigg junction, a modern house, ‘Whitrigg Station House’ has been built on the site of the old station; there’s no sign of the railway bridge across the River Wampool. A woman weeding beneath her front wall smiles and flaps her hands, and says, “The clegs are bad today.” At Bowness, the stone station building is a private house, hidden by trees.

The pillars on the Bowness embankment are warm in the sun; a few rusty bolts remind us of the noise and bustle, and doubtless dangers, of the viaduct’s construction. The pillars remain as a monument to “one of the greatest engineering feats of the day”.

Crossing the Sulewath: A guest post by David Livermore

Detail of Crawford’s 1804 map: Reproduced with permission of the National Library of Scotland.

Two big rivers feed the head of the Solway.  The Eden drains all Cumbria from Helvellyn to the Pennines, the Esk harvests a rainy quarter of the Southern Uplands. Rockcliffe Marsh separates their outlets and the OS map shows few features except for swamp.  This geography doesn’t matter if you’re speeding up the M6 and M74, but was critical in the past.  The old road crossed the Eden via Carlisle’s medieval bridge, 10 miles from the river mouth, then followed its east bank.  The Esk wasn’t bridged until 1759.   Before then you waded the ‘Sulewath’ near the Esk mouth or were rowed over at Willie of the Boats (see A labyrinth on Rockcliffe Marsh, 1884, p71).

Celia Fiennes rode southbound in 1697:

[The Esk] which is very broad and hazardous to crosse even when the tyde is out, by which it leaves a broad sand on each side which in some places is unsafe and made me take a Good Guide which carry’d me aboute and a crosse some part of it here and some part in another place, it being deep in the channel where I did crosse which was in sight of the mouth of the river that runs into the sea….

Prince Charlie retreated northbound in December 1745, with the Esk in spate. He was lucky to get over, with the cavalry in two ranks to break the flow and the infantry marching between. ‘A Hundred Pipers’ commemorates the crossing, but reverses its direction and implies future glory, not the butcher’s bill of Culloden Field.

Wi’ a hundred pipers, an’ a’, an’ a’. / The Esk was swollen sae red an’ sae deep, / But shouther to shouther the brave lads keep; / Twa thousand swam owre to fell English ground / An’ danced themselves dry to the pibroch’s sound.

Other fords crossed the lower Eden, saving the upstream diversion to Carlisle.  Cattle drovers came this way, pushing their herds into West Cumberland.  The southbound Prince Charlie came too, outflanking Carlisle, which surrendered with embarrassing alacrity.  Old maps give the Peatwath below Castleton House and another ford at Rockcliffe.  Long beforehand, Edward I – Hammer of the Scots – died of a bloody flux at Burgh by Sands, preparing to cross and punish Robert the Bruce for insurrection. Perhaps Rockcliffe Marsh wasn’t so extensive then and the ‘real’ Sulewath, from which the Solway takes its name (see The Fords of the Solway, 1939, p58), was a long oversands route from Burgh to Gretna, punctuated by the two river channels.  That would also explain how Alexander II, returning from looting Cumberland, lost an army to the tide in 1216.  You need a long crossing for a big catastrophe.

And me? I came at the end of a 20-year project – which gradually grew and grew – to walk the edge of England. Chester to Gretna was my last coastal stretch and Cumbria became a ribbon of oversands crossings.  The light and loneliness are addictive, spiced by fear that it might just go horribly wrong.

The Queen’s Guides brought me over Morecambe Bay and I danced round Duddon quicksand with Gilly the Fiddler , failing to catch flukes with our feet. Peel to Walney Island I crossed alone, also the Cumberland Esk, its shallow water bitter cold. Autumn had come.  In November I failed to find anyone who’d take me over Moricambe Bay, Grune to Longdyke, and blistered my heels walking the road, mocked by a footpath sign at Anthorn, which points straight into the river.  I reached Glasson on Solway that afternoon but, next weekend, the rains came.  All Cumbria was awash.  Riverside paths were impassable, let alone oversands routes.  I retreated to Kent.

At last, a warm May weekend this year pulled me to Mark Messenger’s Highland Laddie pub at Glasson and to a fluid arrangement to cross the Solway, made over home-caught trout.  Saturday night’s plan was oversands from Glasson to Torduff. But it’s a neap tide, meaning that low water isn’t low enough. Spring tides are better: low means low. So, Sunday breakfast, we swap to a scheme that Mark would meet me, 2pm, at Burgh by Sands and see me over the Eden.  That would save the walk to Carlisle and I can pick up the Cumbria Coastal Way to Metal Bridge.

At Old Sandsfield, a little before noon, I see the Eden up close.  It’s big, deep, dark and muddy.

Satellite view, from Google Earth, showing the Eden, the Esk and Rockcliffe Marsh, at low tide

But, encouraged by the thought that the tide has two more hours to drop, I head inland to Burgh. At the Greyhound I drink cider and rearrange my rucksack, clearing the bottom compartment to take my boots. They’ll wedge spare clothes higher up. Then I shorten the camera sling so it rides on my chest and shift banknotes to my hat, which I tie down hard.   Some things are better dry.

Mark’s van interrupts my drink and we lurch down a rutted lane, scraping the chassis, then walk over pathless fields.  Reaching open marsh, we cut a quarter mile south of King Edward’s monument, then turn north, over channels bridged by concrete drains.

A short half-mile brings us to a sandbank next to the Eden, where I make a fool of myself struggling into borrowed waders – with a shoulder strap caught under my crotch.  Other estuaries I’ve done in shorts and trekking sandals.  That’s my excuse.  Second try I get it right.

Edward I’s monument on Burgh Marsh (photo: Ann Lingard)

Edward I’s monument, guarded by railings (C) David Livermore

Mark suddenly suggests, ‘It’s low.  We could get over Rockcliffe Marsh and the Esk too, if you like?’

‘Have we time?’  It’s two hours to low water, and the Esk must be an hour away.  Mark must re-cross, and the upper Solway tides ebb for 10 hours and rise in two.  It’s not good to be late.

‘I’ll get back fine.  And if we can’t get over the Esk, you walk out to Metal Bridge.’

‘Let’s do it. ‘Thanks!’

The Eden at Sandsfield (C) David Livermore

 So we step into the Eden, Mark ahead and me tailing.  He carries a pole for balance and to test the bottom, which is firm. Brown lapping water deepens quickly: knees, thighs; little waves up to my waist.  Deeper than the Kent or Leven, let alone the Duddon, but not much force. I’m interested, rather than discomforted, that my right leg is filling with river.

‘We’re over,’ says Mark with satisfaction, still midstream.  We are too: the Eden turns shallower with every subsequent step until we reach the sand, where my foot acts as a pump, expelling a fountain from an obvious boot-hole.

From here we steer over Rockcliffe Marsh, which is higher and firmer than the map suggests, talking of salmon and tides, making a line towards Gretna’s houses.  Bullocks follow, friskily curious. Mark sees them as a good omen. The farmer only puts them on the marsh when it’s dry, he says. The channels, saltmarsh traps, are easily jumpable, even in waders, leastways until we hit a big evil-looking one with sloping brown sides and a bottom like watery diarrhoea.  The sides are too wide and sloped for a clear leap.

Mark goes first, hits the far slope and sinks in the ooze. I’m not sure how deeply because I shut my eyes for a moment. Which is a stupid thing to do, preventing me from learning anything useful.  As I open them he’s extricating a filthy knee and telling me to go further up.  Which I do, turning a small corner and finding a place where a cow has crossed.  Gingerly I edge down the sloping earth, then leap, landing on all fours, relieved to find that only one leg is sinking.  A quick scrabble and I’m clear, muddy handed, one wader hanging loose.

‘Have to watch for that one coming back,’ observes Mark.

To my relief, we hit no more traps.  Instead we follow the route of the farmer’s quad bike, roughly north by northeast.  Metal Bridge and its lorries are visible in a foreign world to the east. It might as well be China.  More relevant are white skeletons of trees stripped of bark and stranded on the marsh.  They mean we’re near the Esk, Mark tells me, and we talk of the winter floods that swept them down from Scotland.

The guide, Mark Messenger (C) David Livermore

Mark crossing the Eden (C) David Livermore

Ten more minutes we’re by the channel, on another little sandbank, from which we try to cross.  The river deepens.  And deepens.  Water from the leaking leg cascades over the fork and fills the other, from which it can’t escape.  Rats.  Even so, I’m quite relaxed: we’re half way over the Sulewath.  Then Mark halts and tells me we’ve hit a ‘pool’. So we turn and stand in the river, watching it flow around us, before retreating to where we started.  It is all slow motion.

Fifty yards upstream a little rib of stones runs out, with the water rippling over them.   Here we try again.

‘It’ll be shallower where you can see the flow,’ is Mark’s judgement. ‘It’s still waters that run deep.’

Which proves spot on.  It’s no deeper than the Eden, with a firm sandy bottom, which turns to soft mud as we reach the far shore.

‘Go over this quick,’ I’m told, ‘It’s a bit sinky’.

Despite the weight of water I’m now carrying, I lunge 20 yards forwards, feeling the suction of the mud, but refusing it time to pull me, then drop onto flotsam besides a stone embankment.

Here, after I’ve thanked Mark and we’ve parted, I sit for a long while, catching breath, playing with the camera and changing into dry shorts. Then I make my way along the strand, crunching driftwood, till the embankment is blocked by a barbed-wired gate and the beach by a barricade of old iron. I could force this, but decide I’ve won the day, dodge round two fields and climb a gate to the old A74, shortly before it curves away from the motorway. In less than a mile I’m by the Gretna Chase Hotel.  Immediately beyond is Sark Bridge, with the ‘Welcome to Scotland’ sign.  The whole English coast is behind me, which I cannot quite believe.

I sit for a long time, thinking of 3000 miles of coast and Offa’s Dyke behind me. Or is it 4000? Everyone asks, and I’ve no idea.  The Solway was a good finish and I recall ‘kindness received at stranger hands’ – men like Mark, who have taken me on these old oversands ‘roads’, not quite lost in a world with little use for them. Then, very slowly, over an apple, my mind turns to the line ahead: 105 miles to Berwick, to close my circle.   It’ll be strange without the sea.

A bus ride later, grubby and with my hat pulled down over a broad grin, I weave my way into Carlisle’s Crown and Mitre Hotel, through wedding guests who’ve emerged for a cigarette: dark suits, loosened ties, white gloves, smooth satin dresses. The desk manager look askance at this approaching tramp, delegating me to a junior, who enquires if I’ve had a good day.

‘You bet, ‘ I say, ‘I’ve waded the Sulewath….’

---

My grateful thanks to David for taking the time to write this account of this northern finale to his epic walk.

I walked a short part of the Solway coastpath with Professor David Livermore last year. Knowing of my own Solway crossing from Bowness, and my blog-post about the ancient ‘waths’, he’d been in touch with me to ask if I knew anything about the possible crossing of Moricambe Bay and the River Wampool at Anthorn. I went on a (slightly unnerving and unsuccessful) recce for him, and also was glad to put him in touch with my friend, the guide and haaf-netter, Mark Messenger, who subsequently very ably guided him across the river waths.

 

The ‘Sir John Fisher’: a trip in a lifeboat from Workington to Whitehaven

 

The Sir John Fisher, waiting to enter the water at Workington

“Ann? Come and stand here.”

You don’t argue with John Stobbart, Coxwain of the Sir John Fisher. He’s a tall, imposing man with a gruff voice, and he’s standing at the wheel of Workington’s lifeboat – which is currently suspended over the sea. It’s the Solway’s only All-Weather Lifeboat (ALB) and is the only one of the UK’s ALBs to be launched in this way, slung from a davit. Minutes earlier I’d watched as it was hoisted from its tracks and lifted sideways, out over the water. The boat was lowered, bringing the deck level with the quay, and I and the crew stepped aboard.

I stand by the aft hatch, out of the way, watching the business of getting the boat ready for sea.

Then John orders me to stand next to him.

“You’re going to steer,” he says.

Sideways …

Over the edge…

Lower …

Crew step aboard …

***

I’d been gathering information about the Solway’s lifeboats and coastguards, to write a longer article for Solway Shore Stories about how the Firth’s waters are protected, and just a few days previously I’d contacted John Stobbart to ask if I could come and talk to him about the RNLI’s Workington boats. He phoned back to ask if I was free to join them for a trip down to Whitehaven: an offer I certainly wasn’t going to refuse!

My plan had been to glean as much information as possible about the activities of  the two boats, in the wider context of the Firth’s protection – but what I learnt instead is part of the Sir John Fisher’s swan-song.

She (or should a boat named after a male donor be gender-neutral?) has been in service for 24 years and, as one of the few remaining Tyne-class ALBs, will be retired from the RNLI’s fleet next year. This, then, was a trip to launch the appeal for funding for her replacement, a new Shannon-class ALB.

***

One of the crew found me the appropriate gear – the smallest wader-and-boots combination in the store. There were straps to deal with, then a yellow waterproof jacket and a lifejacket.

I was given a helmet with a visor so I could “get the feel of it”. Michael Cowling (Second Mechanic) showed me the red tube down which I could blow to inflate the inside of the helmet against my head to hold it in position.

Helmets

(Mechanics, incidentally, don’t wear lifejackets below deck – presumably so they can crawl into tiny spaces by the engines.)

I stepped aboard, tried to keep out of the way.

The boat was being lowered the final few metres into the water.

 

And,“You’re going to steer,” John Stobbart says.

“As soon as you see we’re in the water – we’re in it now – you’re going to go astern …. These two handles—” he takes my right hand, “pull them back towards you, see here where it says ‘Astern’. Keep the wheel where it is, see, here at zero.” Next to the wheel is a metal plate marked in degrees, zero at the bottom, increasing in steps of 10^o in both directions.

The boat inches backwards out of the slings.

I can’t see clearly because my helmet keeps slipping down over my eyes.

“Now, you’re going to turn, and follow the other boat out.” I have to push both throttle levers forward, gently, turn the wheel hard round to the right – and the bow swings to starboard and we circle to point out towards the sea. The ‘other boat’ is Workington’s inflatable Class D Inshore Lifeboat (ILB), the John F Mortimer, with a crew of three. It’s light and manoeuvrable, and ALB crew member Stephen Mcallister tells me, “We use it for recovering persons stranded on rocks, because it can go in shallow water. We can even beach it if we have to.”

ILB John F Mortimer

“Follow the other boat.” Out through the mouth of the Derwent estuary, between the piled boulders of the sea-defences on the left, and North Bank on the right. The boat veers towards the sandbank.

“You’re too busy talking, Ann, you need to turn 10 degrees to the left.”

I stop my nervous chatter. I need to get used to the slight delay in the boat’s response. The Solway is flat and grey, the wind-turbines are motionless – what must it be like to steer this boat, to make intricate manoeuvres near a broken boat, a person in the water, in huge seas?

We’re out into the channel. “Now, push the levers as far ahead as you can, both together.” Our speed increases dramatically, the bow lifts, and I can’t see what’s ahead.  John clicks down the two switches to the left of the wheel, which activate two hydraulically-operated plates at the keel to change the trim (there’s a photo elsewhere on this blog) and the bow drops: visibility restored.

“See that yacht there? Head inside it. Keep to the left.”

And so I steer this sturdy lifeboat, in its smart blue, red and yellow livery, on a slightly nervous and wavering course along the coast, South towards Whitehaven.

There isn’t time to enjoy the new perspective of the coast. I snatch a quick glance astern at our widening wake. The ILB is dashing around us, bumping through the wake and out into the Firth. Members of the crew are standing around on deck or busy in the cabin; Gary McKeating is taking photographs (I see later that my smile looks more like a rictus of fear).

After about ten astonishing minutes (I really am ‘driving’ a lifeboat!) John reclaims the wheel so that I can go below to see what is happening in the cabin. I’m allowed to take off the helmet.

***

The main cabin

Steven Wood, today’s navigator, is immediately welcoming and starts to explain what he is doing. He shows me the on-screen chart, and our position. Using that nearby yacht as an example, he explains how he can mark the position of whatever needs rescuing; the computer then draws a line between the lifeboat and the object, and the measurements of the bearing and distance come up on screen.

 

In the main cabin

Steven Wood explains what is on the display

There’s a smaller back-up screen, “And if all else fails, there’s always the chart,” he smiles, lifting manuals to show the laminated one on the desk.

“We can calculate the time from this manual if we know the wind speed and the direction of the tide.” Diagrams show the vector based on tide and wind.
“And we’re transmitting all this information to the coastguard at Belfast to keep them in the picture.”

“But that’s mainly for when we’re further out at sea. Close in, we use our own knowledge, we’re all locals.” Steven points to the outlines of a sandbank on the digital display.  “The tide can be running in on the outer side, but the current on this side might be in the opposite direction.” Long-standing local knowledge is vital in the tricky Firth.

Ryan Lawson is sitting further forward, in front of the radar screen. He’s the youngest of the volunteer crew, at 20 years, and joined two years ago. When I ask him what made him join up, he smiles and shrugs. “It’s in the family. My Dad’s here, he’s on the crew.” Is it difficult to get away from work? “I work in a garage, so it usually works out ok.”

Later, the Operations Manager Tim Chittenden tells me that there are currently 25 volunteers (the Mechanic is employed by the RNLI). “We had a patch a couple of years ago when we were a little bit low on numbers, but we’re just training up three very good new recruits. The crew are from all backgrounds – there’s John, of course, who has his own construction business, there’s an engine driver, a cage-fighter who’s an expert in martial arts, a plasterer, and of course quite a few from Sellafield.”

When there’s a ‘shout’, they’re contacted by their pagers, and Steven tells me that a minimum of six crew are needed to man the boat. Four of the crew are trained as mechanics, and most of the crew are trained to do the other jobs – this morning Ryan has been having further training on the radar. There are seven seats in the main cabin, a few for specific occupations. “When there’s a call-out, the crew come in and sit down. The seats at the front are the best, everyone likes that one [by the radar]. No-one likes this seat!”

We climb through into the small forward cabin, one of the ‘recovery rooms’ (there’s another one at the stern). There’s a folding bench along one wall; a small sink and kettle; boxes with flares, a spare anchor chain; boxes with spare parts for the boat and one labelled ‘hot cans’; a panel with fuses and relays for the engines. The toilet, a chemical loo, is an unscreened box with a lid: I don’t bother to investigate.

Steps down inot the ‘recovery room’

Boxes of essentials

‘Keep shut at sea’

An open hatch leads forward to an even smaller compartment where the anchors are stored; there’s another hatch in the roof leading to the deck. If these hatches, and the one to the main cabin, are closed the compartment is completely watertight. “The boat can still float with several compartments flooded,” Steven says. “And as long as one engine still works we’re ok.”

I try to imagine what it would be like in here, in stormy seas. Steven pokes the ceiling: “The ceiling’s got polystyrene padding so your head gets some protection!”  Here at the bow, the cabin would be crashing up and down, it would be noisy from the waves and from the engines. You could get very sea-sick, I suggest. Steven laughs. “But you’d think it was better than where you’d come from!”And as Tim says later, “It’s better than being dead!”

Coming into Whitehaven

The Sir John Fisher enters Whitehaven marine (thanks to Mark Regan for this photo)

We’re now approaching Whitehaven and John is pulling a strange outfit from a bag. There’s a deal of banter as he climbs into the giant ‘Stormy Stan’ costume that has already been used in previous fund-raising events; he can only see through the netting at Stan’s mouth by tipping Stan’s head backwards to apparently admire the sky.

The port authority comes on the radio noting our arrival. Men and boys are fishing from the quays; people gather to laugh and take photos; Stan waves his huge gloved hands as he steers, and booms out “hallo!”

‘Stormy Stan’ greeting his fans (thanks to Mark Regan for this photo)

‘Stormy Stan’ steering (or star-gazing?)

The eight swans paddling in the marina show no interest at all.

The ILB putters in and moors behind us on the pontoon.

The start of the Shannon Appeal: Anne Thomas, Judith Hodgson, Robert McLaughlin & Wayne Fox

There is a gazebo on the quay, a photographer and reporter, and a group of smiling on-shore volunteers – and the  ‘Shannon Lifeboat Appeal’ is launched in conjunction with the help of The Times and Star.

‘Stormy Stan’ waves and shouts.

***

 

Tim Chittenden, wearing a pale blue shirt with the RNLI logo, comes down to the boat and introduces himself. Tall, fluent and with a quietly humorous manner, he was a marine engineer, and eventually a rear-admiral, in the Royal Navy. He tells me he then worked at Barrow for five years before retiring and moving to West Cumbria. Then, four years ago,“John [Stobbart] approached me to see if I’d like to get involved and pretty soon I was hooked!” He mimes holding a fishing rod and reeling in the line.

He is now the Workington RNLI’s Operations Manager, responsible for the day-to-day running of the station, and the launching of the lifeboats.

“The boats from Silloth and St Bees’,” he explains, “can go out in up to a Force 7 or 8. But this boat can take up to a Force 10. We can cover an area all the way up from Ravenglass to Port Carlisle, across to the Isle of Whithorn and half-way to the Isle of Man.”

We talk about the design of the new Shannon class ALB, due to arrive at Workington next year. It’s faster – it can travel at over 25 knots as compared with the Sir John Fisher’s 15kn.

Designed in-house by the RNLI, its fibre-reinforced plastic hull has a specially developed new shape to reduce the impact of crashing into waves and, propelled by twin water-jets (like the highly-manoeuvrable boats that service the windfarm) it can move in any direction, even laterally, fast.

All six crew will be seated, and each seat will have screen showing the Systems Integration and Management System (SIMS) which, according to the RNLI, “provides access to all communications (VHF, DF, intercom), navigation (radar, chart, DGPS, depth and speed) and machinery monitoring including engines, transmission, fuel and bilge.” This means that information about any of the systems can be transferred to any of the crew.

Later, on the quay, Bob McLaughlin tells me about the seats with great glee. I’m very pleased to meet Bob again; we last met, by chance, about a year ago when one of the Tyne-class boats was being lifted from the sea at Whitehaven, when he took great delight in showing me all kinds of different design features of the boat’s hull.

He’s been with Workington RNLI in a variety of roles since 1962, is currently the Chairman of the Management Committee, and has just been awarded the RNLI’s highest honour, Honorary Life Governor of the Institution.

The hydraulic seats have also been carefully designed, Bob tells me, laughing. There are collars and adjustments, so that anybody can adjust the amount of rise and fall to fit their weight. Images of yo-yos come to mind.

But the speed and comfort are important. Tim emphasises the benefits: “It will have the great advantage that the crew will arrive in good shape, they won’t have been knocked around, they’ll be in the best possible condition for the rescue. And they’ll be safer, so it’s better for the RNLI.” And of course, the boat will reach the people needing to be rescued and get them back to shore more quickly.

As for the future of the Sir John Fisher: next year the crew will go down to RNLI HQ at Poole to train on the new Shannon and to do sea-trials. Then the new boat and a ‘spare’ plus some professional staff will come to Workington for a week and help with the training here. The crew each have to take an exam at the end. “When the RNLI decide we know what we’re doing,” Tim says, “they’ll take away the old boat and the ‘spare’.”

While we stand talking, people stop by the gazebo to find out about the Shannon Appeal. They’re invited to come aboard the Sir John Fisher, and to look at the ILB. There are Shannon mugs for sale.

The appeal has been launched here in Whitehaven because it will be more visible in this popular location, for one problem with the lifeboat station at Workington is that it’s almost invisible: the port is on the outskirts, and not open to the public (in comparison with St Bees’ and Silloth where dozens of people walk past the boathouses all the time). As Second Coxwain Stephen McAllister says to me, “Don’t get me wrong, we like Whitehaven – but we’re from Workington.” And of course that’s where they’d most like to be seen and supported. But by taking a display stand (with Stormy Stan) at local carnivals and other events, “We try to raise the profile for the station.”

The crew pose for a photo and then strip off their yellow suits and head off into town. Alayne Cowling, the mechanic’s mother and one of the onshore fund-raising volunteers, later tells me that the pub donated £20 to the fund.

Whitehaven Marina, June 18th 2016 (Thanks to Mark Regan, for this photo)

(Mark Regan : https://www.facebook.com/TheRegsyphotography/)

Crew, from L to R: Joe Birkett, Ryan Lawson, Michael Cowling (2nd mechanic), Stephen Mcallister (2nd Coxswain), John Stobbart (Coxwain), Pat Carr, Steven Howard (ILB helmsman), Lee Moore, Steven Wood

Front row (in RNLI blue shirts and ties): Robert McLaughlin (Station Chariman), Tim Chittenden (Lifeboat Operations Manager), Wayne Fox (treasurer)

***

The Shannon Lifeboat Appeal (supported by Sellafield Ltd and the Times and Star)

Details from the RNLI website:

‘The total cost of Workington RNLI’s Shannon class lifeboat is £2Million. It will be part-funded as follows:

• By a generous legacy in excess of £1Million from the late Mrs Dorothy May White. Dorothy, a long-time supporter of the RNLI, came from Birmingham and died in February 2012. Workington RNLI’s Shannon will be named Dorothy May White in her memory.
• A donation of £500,000 from The Sir John Fisher Foundation. The Sir John Fisher Foundation is a charitable trust established in 1980 by Sir John and Lady Maria Fisher. The Foundation’s objective is to distribute its income to charitable causes throughout the UK, but with special regard to those based in and working for the benefit of people living in and around Barrow-in-Furness and surrounding area.
• From accrued donations from numerous RNLI supporters (the Workington Shannon was also the recipient of the RNLI’s Summer Appeal mailing).

The RNLI looks forward to the appeal raising the remaining £150,000.’

 

How to donate:

Directly online via Just Giving

Or text RNLI WORKINGTON to 70300 and donate £5

Allonby Bay MCZ: a ‘slimy dangerous place?’

Low tide at Dubmill, looking across to Criffel (Thanks to Alan Sawyer for this photo)

Allonby Bay, on Cumbria’s Solway coast, recently became a Marine Conservation Zone; there are now 50 MCZs in English and ‘non-devolved’ waters and proposals for more are under consideration.

Most people, probably, neither know nor would they care.

Here are some figures, taken from a 2008 survey carried out for Natural England (1):

•  99% of the 4000 people surveyed couldn’t name a feature or creature associated with the (general) undersea landscape;
•  44% thought it was ‘barren’.
•  For 60% of the sample the instinctive response to the undersea landscape “is characterised by a mixture of fear, disgust and shame: fear because it is a dangerous place, disgust because it is thought to be cold, dark and slimy … and shame because it is thought to have been allowed to get into this state …”

There’s also a North-South divide: “Northerners describe ‘their’ sea as dirtier and colder than the rest of the country and cite industrial pollution as a big factor in this.”

Sir Martin Holdgate, Trustee for Cumbria Wildlife Trust, noted at the North-West Wildlife Trusts’ Irish Sea conference a couple of years ago that “it is difficult for us as land-mammals to understand what is going on in the oceans.”

A sea of acronyms

Another part of the problem is the complicated sets of acronyms and conservation designations, and legislative bodies (if any) who over see them. The Allonby Bay Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ) is a type of Marine Protected Area (MPA); much of the Firth is also a European Marine Site, which encompasses various other types of designation (SAC, SPA etc).

It is a relief to know that so much of the Firth’s special habitats and wildlife is under statutary protection (although unfortunately this doesn’t necessarily mean active protection and management), but most people – understandably – are unaware of, or don’t understand the meaning of, the acronym-ed areas. Conservationists banging on about, well, conservation, yet again. Hard to get excited …

To help with that, I strongly recommend the Solway Firth Partnership’s very readable, clear and informative explanation of the Solway’s various protected areas and their designations.

And the Joint Nature Conservation Council (JNCC) has a helpful interactive map of the UK’s MPAs – home in on the Solway, increase the magnification, and click on the areas outlined in colour to see what type of MPA they are and what are the features responsible for that listing.

Of course, more interest might be stirred if some major threat to the sea or shore is observed or proposed: dumping of rubbish on a large scale, say, or huge jetties for a quarry, or large spills of oil or toxic chemicals. Even then, the emphasis might initially reference the economic and health consequences for the local human population.

This sounds like a harsh judgement, but realistically, how many people really care about fish? ‘Iconic’ species like whales and basking sharks (we don’t have any polar bears in the Firth) are always news-worthy, but who bothers about honeycomb worm reefs, starfish, soft corals, sea-slugs and the planktonic larvae of barnacles? Or the different colours and species of algae?

These organisms might sound trivial (invertebrates, weeds!) yet they are a vital part of the great web of interactions that populates our seas.

Belts and corridors

DEFRA, in their email announcing the new tranche of MCZs, explained how the MCZs ‘will extend the country’s ‘Blue Belt’ to cover over 20% of English waters providing vital protection for the diverse array of wildlife in our seas.’

The language helps. ‘Blue Belt’ has a good visual image.

‘Wildlife Corridor’ (which would be one important result of the Blue Belt) also gives us an image with which we are already familiar (animals scurrying through interlinking hedgerows, and along tree-clad motorway and railway embankments).

So, to imagine corridors in the sea, we need to populate those corridors with marine animals and plants.

To do that, we have to ‘see’ the features, and the creatures that move or are fixed in place, the prey and the predators, the larvae and other offspring – in what is essentially their own ‘urban’ environment: creatures living in a place that is not barren or slimy or disgusting (because if it is any of those things, we have made it so).

What is Allonby Bay MCZ?

Allonby Bay MCZ is an inshore site stretching approximately 9km along the coast from Dubmill Point to just north of Maryport, and about 4km out into the Firth; this map, taken from the designation document, shows the position and the co-ordinates.

It has an area of 39km²  – that’s an area approximately 1/540^th the size of Wales, or equivalent to about 7000 football pitches (but volume, in terms of Olympic swimming-pools, varies according to the tide).

It was “recommended as an MCZ because of the diverse range of marine habitats and species it supports. In particular, this includes large areas of nationally important living reefs, formed by the honeycomb worm (Sabellaria alveolata) and blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) beds…. [which] can extend for tens of metres across and up to a metre tall. In an otherwise ever-changing environment, these reefs are able to support a wide range of other shore dwelling species including anemones, snails, shore crabs and seaweeds. … Allonby Bay supports some of the best examples of these reefs in the UK. The peat exposures provide a habitat which piddocks, a type of burrowing clam, and other species can tunnel into.” (Natural England document, p50) 

The whereabouts of the special features that make Allonby Bay an MCZ – including the mussel beds, honeycomb worm reefs and peat exposures (part of the submerged forest) – are shown in these maps.

Mussel beds

Peat

Honeycomb-worm reefs and mounds

And you can read much more about them in separate, illustrated articles, on Solway Shore Stories.

What can you do, and not do, in Allonby Bay MCZ?

You can still enjoy swimming, recreational sea-angling, sailing and wind-surfing, kayaking, walking the dog and eating ice-creams – there will be no change.

As for commercial fisheries, the fishing industry and the North-West Inshore Fisheries Conservation Authority (NW IFCA) were amongst those involved in the initial discussions. Dredging and trawling within the MCZ would clearly damage the sea-bed but, as Dr Emily Baxter, Marine Conservation Officer for the North-West Wildlife Trusts, told me, “They are not automatically prohibited”; however neither trawlers nor the shrimp-boats from Silloth work in this area. As David Dobson, formerly of NWIFCA, said, “The ground’s too rough – the shrimp-boats avoid it like the plague, it does too much damage to their nets.” Again, no change.

Who will oversee the protection?

There are various organisations responsible for overseeing the MCZ status, listed on the government fact-sheet about MCZs in general (an extract is shown here).

The Marine Management Organisation (MMO), based at Whitehaven, oversees fishing within the 6-12 nautical mile zone – but their management won’t be necessary since that’s outwith the Allonby Bay MCZ’s limits.

NW IFCA will oversee the shell-fisheries: the cockle- and mussel-fisheries, neither of which have actually operated for several years, are protected by Bye-Laws and have in any case always required licences and oversight from NWIFCA.

Some – although not all – of the intertidal honeycomb worm reefs, too, are already protected from bottom-towed fishing gear by NWIFCA’s Byelaw 6.

In reply to my question about management, Mandy Knott, Senior Scientist at NWIFCA, told me: “You are right in that we do not anticipate at this stage that there will be any additional management required for the Allonby Bay MCZ as far as fisheries are concerned. … The Conservation Objective [CO] for the site is ‘maintain’ and there are therefore no immediate causes for concern as long as activity within the site remains constant or decreases. The NWIFCA monitors all fishing activity in its District, both commercial and recreational, and should levels increase then a relevant assessment of risk and impact on features will be carried out, in consultation with Natural England. Should evidence show that management is required then the NWIFCA will act accordingly.”

However, Dr Emily Baxter of the NW Wildlife Trusts thinks it might well be necessary to keep an eye on the fisheries: “Even though the CO is ‘maintain’, this does not mean do nothing, and active management may be required to manage existing activity and future-proof the area from potential damage.”

This at least gives hope that the MCZ will not merely be a ‘paper park’, as Professor Callum Roberts maintains for MCZs in general; you can read his Guardian article here, or watch him talking to Tom Heap on BBC’s Countryfile (at about 8 minutes in)

As for harbours and ports, the Port of Silloth is outwith the MCZ, although the Solway Buoy is stationed just within the area.

But one important aspect of management is down to DECC – and that concerns coal and oil extraction. We shouldn’t forget that Cluff Resources are maintaining their Solway licences for underground coal gasification in the Allonby Bay area; at the moment all is quiet on that front, but …

Basically, then, it’s all rather unexciting,  and we can probably all carry on much as before, in Allonby Bay. Or can we?

The ‘barren’ undersea?

When I’ve taken people down the beach on good low tides, we reach the first signs of the honeycomb worm (Sabellaria) reef and I often ask if anyone notices something different about the rocks. Some do, but at first many don’t, notice that the ‘rocks’ are actually intricate masses of sandy-tubes built by the Sabellaria. And so often, someone then remarks, “I just thought they were rocks!”

And within the next hour or so, we watch crawling, grazing winkles; find dog-whelks preying on barnacles; ‘baked bean’ tunicates and different types of sponges living amongst the reefs; dahlia and beadlet anemones, feeding tentacles extended or tucked inside their stomachs; eggs of dog-whelks and ragworms; the shelly tubes of mason-worms; the coils and holes of lugworms; gammarid shrimps, small fish, brittle stars …  Many of the sessile animals are quiescent, just waiting for the tide to come in. Many of the predatory animals – ragworms, crabs – have hidden, leaving behind only their footprints. We see how every hard surface in the intertidal area is coated with animals and algae.

All this, so many species, so much busy-ness, even when the tide is out! (Enjoy these photos of organisms in the new MCZs on the Guardian website.) At low tide we get a snapshot of the Allonby Bay Marine Conservation Zone.

But now imagine it when the tide comes in, bringing food, planktonic larvae, predatory fish. Colourful algae, flattened on the rocks when the tide is out, are buoyed up and swaying in the current; tube-worms and anemones and barnacles extend their arms and legs, mussels filter the water to catch their food, ragworms and crabs hunt for live prey, limpets and chitons crawl, grazing. Fish browse, chase, mate.

All these organisms interacting in different and subtle ways, a complex meshwork – a ‘Living Sea’.

Let’s celebrate!

That’s what our MCZ is about. We need to shout it out, celebrate how lucky we are to have something special and precious here on our Solway shore. And spread the news that it’s part of something special and precious about our seas – and the health and beauty of the world’s seas.

Allonby Bay is not just about ice-creams and acronyms.

 ***

Join me on a low-tide shorewalk to discover more about Allonby Bay. Full details are on the Solway Shore Stories website.

Visit the excellent Lake District Coast aquarium at Maryport to see local marine species.

Find out more about the WildlifeTrust’s Living Seas Project, and how you can be involved, on their website , and specifically on Cumbria Wildlife Trust’s website. You can also find Living Seas North West on Facebook,Twitter @LivingSeasNW or www.irishsea.org

(1) ROSE, C., DADE, P. & SCOTT, J. 2008. Qualitative and Quantitative Research into Public Engagement with the Undersea Landscape in England. Natural England Research Reports, NERR019.

 

Peat-coring on Kirkconnell Flow

Kirkconnell Flow, South of Dumfries and West of the River Nith, is one of those valuable and unusual peat-bogs known as raised mires or, more poetically, Mosses. There are several around the edges of the Solway Firth, all protected in various ways and by various organisations.

The heather-fringed peat-dome

Pine forest at the edges of the Moss

Kirkconnell Flow is a Scottish National Nature Reserve (NNR), a UK Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and an EU Special Area of Conservation (SAC) – but don’t be put off by all the conservation acronyms. It’s a special place, with a complicated history and, as is already apparent, a place with optimism, and insights, about the future.

Dr Lauren Parry and some of the Borderlands#2 group

 

At the end of April this year a group of artists, poets and fiction-writers, scientists of various sorts, sound-artists and composers wandered out onto the Flow as part of the Borderlands#2 gathering – not only to experience what being on a Moss or Flow or Mire might mean, but for a more practical purpose, too: to get our hands dirty – to go peat-coring.

 

Like all the other raised mires around the Upper Solway, Kirkconnell Flow is a dome of peat. I’ve borrowed Scottish Natural Heritage’s beautifully visual description of its origin: “When the glaciers retreated from Scotland 10,000 years ago, the landscape was littered with many pits, often within a layer of watertight glacial debris or till. These basins formed lochs and were colonised by a fringe of fen plants, which slowly spread across the lochs until no open water was left. A combination of loch sediment and plant material eventually led to many lochs completely infilling. As the loch basin filled with fen peats and sediments, the plants could no longer root in the mineral soils below.

Plants in the outer fringes of the swamp soaked up all of the nutrients flowing in from the surrounding ground, leaving the centre of the swamp waterlogged and nutrient-poor – just the right conditions to encourage a bog to form. Sphagnum bog mosses thrive in these conditions and started to dominate the vegetation. The steady upward growth of the living Sphagnum layer and the slow accumulation of the dead vegetation below combined to produce peat.

As peat accumulated, it began to rise above the level of the former loch surface. Once a layer half a metre or more in thickness had formed above the old surface, the peat became isolated from groundwater. The bog therefore became dependent on rainwater alone, deriving all its nourishment from the atmosphere, and as a result is poor in nutrients [my italics].”

‘Reindeer moss’ (Kirkconnell)ll

Bog rosemary (Drumburgh)

Sphagnum (Bowness)

Bog cotton (Drumburgh)

In other words, it’s ‘ombrotrophic’: a new word, one of many that I learnt that afternoon from Dr Lauren Parry, of Glasgow University, who had come to lead us through the heather to the central dome. An ombrotrophic , literally ‘cloud-fed’, bog is one that is wetted only by rain, not by springs or burns, and is isolated from the surrounding landscape. Rain is poor in nutrients, so only those plants that tolerate acid, low-nutrient conditions live there: the richly-coloured Sphagnum mosses; the berry-bearing plants such as blaeberry and crowberry; bog-myrtle and bog rosemary with their crushed-leaf scents; pale ‘reindeer moss’ lichen; and the white fluffy flags of the bog-cottons. It was early in the year when we visited, but the hints of past and future were there – even wizened last-season crowberries amongst the cotton-buds.

Bracket fungi

A roe-deer hind watches us

To reach the dome of peat we had walked a woodland path ringing with the descending chromatic scales of competing willow-warblers, and waded through knee-deep tangles of heather. The Flow had for decades been gnawed and battered by humans: first by peat-cuttings, then by heather-burning for grouse-moors. Birch carr and pine forest encroached as the water-table dropped and the peat dried out; the trees themselves transpired water and hastened the drying and destabilisation of the mire.

The SNH document describes well the history of the Flow and the damage inflicted upon it. But in 1998 they purchased the Reserve and – as is the case with conservers of the Solway’s other Mosses – are attempting to restore the raised bog’s hydrology. One of the first, and major, tasks, has been to cut down and remove the trees from the central area of the Flow

As Lauren Parry said, “Removing the trees has been an ‘encroachment issue’ which is different from a ‘plantation issue’” (which would have involved probably lengthy discussions about ownership of the plantation, and compensation).

Lauren’s PhD research related to the composition of peat; since then she has concentrated on carbon sequestration – the ways in which peatlands store carbon and how the carbon levels relate to changes in the climate.While very well-practised in the technique of peat-coring, she’s now also exploring less ‘dirty’ techniques such as ground-penetrating radar to get information about the ‘bulk density’, the relative amount of solid, organic material within the peat. I hadn’t realised that a peat-bed may be riddled with ‘pipes’ and cavities and cracks.

And now, out on the Flow proper, there are more words, too; hard-edged words and musical words with a cadence: acrotelm and catotelm, the lagg fen and the haplotelm; the ‘Russian’ corer, proxies, testate amoebae.

“We really love taking cores and looking at them under a microscope,” Lauren says. “The peat’s a wonderful archive.”

Why “an archive”?  Vegetation growing on the thin ‘living’ top layer of the bog (the acrotelm) responds in different ways to the environmental conditions – the amount of rain, warmth, nutrients, pollution. Different species – of plants and of microscopic animals – grow more slowly or out-compete others depending on their favourite conditions. Pollen, even radioactive particles (remember Chernobyl)  blown in from surrounding areas is deposited or incorporated amongst the stems.

The acrotelm and catotelm: diagram from Richard Lindsay’s document for the RSPB (see below for link)

And as plants die and are replaced, they are grown over by new individuals. The combination of new plant growth and water-logging means that oxygen diffuses into the lower layers so slowly that the decomposition of dead plants uses it faster than it can be supplied, and so the lower layers (the catotelm) are anaerobic. Layers of only partly-decomposed plant matter build up in an ‘active mire’.

Dr Richard Lindsay, of the Sustainable Research Unit, University of East London, has written a long, but delightfully easy-to-read and very informative discussion document for the Scottish RSPB on Peat bogs and Carbon, a critical synthesis (2010) – what he calls his ‘Big Bogs Report’ (unfortunately it’s only available online).

‘Peatbogs are responsive systems with homoeostatic mechanisms that are not far removed from those found in living organisms … features having many similarities to tree-rings can be found in the equally-thin layers of peat which are successively deposited in a bog over millenia. These narrow bands of peat tell the same tale as tree-rings but over a much longer time-scale.’

And the peat (or ‘turf’ as it’s called in Ireland – but then, in County Mayo they call herons, ‘storks’) is ‘a direct product of the vegetation which created it. Consequently the characteristics of this peat soil reflect the nature of the vegetation which created it, while the vegetation itself reflects the prevailing hydrological and nutrient conditions.’

So, an archive: which can be examined by drilling down and taking a core, slices of which can undergo a battery of chemical, spectroscopic, radiological and microscopical examination in the lab for the range of minerals and isotopes, for types of pollen, for the hard cases of the unicellular testate amoebae, and more. Amoebae, pollen – these are ‘proxies’, different species flourishing or dying out according to prevailing conditions and therefore acting as indicators. All these measurements provide clues as to what climatic conditions prevailed at the time that ‘peat-ring’ was laid down.

Lauren explains how ‘the Russian’ works

Acrotelm core, with fibrous plant material

The sloppier core from 200cms

Taking a core doesn’t need a drilling-rig, just patience, organisation, and some brute manual force. It required the help of ‘the Russian’ – ‘who’ turned out to be type of metal corer, a side-filling sampler with a sharpened edge; when rotated clockwise the blade cuts a core which is then held in the chamber by a plate. Back on the surface, the corer is rotated in the opposite direction and the undisturbed sample is slid out into a plastic ‘gutter’ which is marked with felt pen for ‘top’ and depth, and the whole is then wrapped in cling film and kept horizontal.

The first core, from the acrotelm, was fibrous with roots and decaying grass and other plants. Fifty-centimetre lengths were gradually added as the Russian penetrated deeper; each time it was then pulled back to disgorge its sample.

The core from 150-200 cms represented life about 2000 years ago.

Gloop-gloop. The corer made wet, sucking sounds as it was pulled free. Deeper cores became smoother and sloppier.

Mid-way

About to ‘bottom-out’ at 650cms

More rods were added: taller, able-bodied men were co-opted to help lift the rod vertically into place. An artist was taking photos of cranberries; someone was watching skylarks through his binoculars; others were sitting on the ground chatting; someone was making notes in a tiny ring-bound book; three of us bounced on the mire’s surface several metres away from the group, and startled faces turned towards us as the quake spread out in waves.

The final, clay, core – from 6.5metres

And then, at 6.5 metres’ depth, the bottom of Kirkconnell Flow was reached! The sample chamber of the corer revealed a glossy grey cylinder of clay, formed by the friction of glaciers against rocks, and deposited around 9000 years ago.

At that time, there would have been forest growing each side of the Firth, birch, hazel, oak and pine. But as the climate became wetter and freshwater drained down towards the Firth, sphagnum mosses formed blanket-bogs in these low-lying areas, the tree-roots became waterlogged, trees died; the remains of this mighty ‘submerged forest’ were preserved in the peat-beds that are occasionally revealed on the Cumbrian shore. Further inland, though, the peat domes of Kirkconnell, Drumburgh, Wedholme and the other raised mires grew and developed, becoming isolated ecosystems with their own special character.

As for ‘our’ peat core, the sections have been frozen and await investigation by Lauren Parry with the help of the creative practitioners of Borderlands#2…

***

Since I wrote this, Kate Foster – artist, writer and organiser of the Borderlines#2 event – has written a lovely piece about how peat, and what it contains, including the proxies of testate amoebae, are inspiring her art.

Snippets 9: ‘Seeing’ the Solway’s bottom

“Between Solway Buoy and Corner Buoy, it’s a critical region, the region that gives us the most trouble. At Corner Buoy there’s a narrow corridor – that channel is our window [to Silloth], to the East of it are big boulders, to the West are shifting sands.’ Captain Ed Deeley, harbourmaster at the Port of Silloth, and a ship’s pilot, explains one of the major problems of navigating the Solway Firth – the sea constantly re-sculpts the sea-bed.

The Admiralty charts for the Firth show areas of sandbanks and ‘changeable depths’. Sediment is constantly on the move, being lifted and deposited, eroded and accreted. This affects fishermen – trawlers, scallop-boats and shrimp-boats, lobster-pot men and haaf-netters – and vessels that service the windfarm, as well as the larger ships that transport goods around the coasts. Ports and harbour entrances need to be dredged, the depths of channels charted and surveyed.

In recent years, the route up to Silloth has been periodically surveyed by the Association of British Ports (ABP), who own the ports of Silloth and Barrow on the Cumbrian coast. Ed Deeley had previously shown me some of ABP’s bathymetric charts for the ‘critical region’ and we were both intrigued by a flat-bottomed, apparently unchanging area South of Corner Buoy. Could it be a layer of peat or boulder clay such as occasionally gets exposed on the shore?

Peat and clay at Beckfoot

Peat and clay and shingle

Peat and clay at Allonby

 

Chris Heppenstall, ABP’s Hydrographic Surveyor, was very willing to show me the data and talk about the surveying, so I went down to Barrow to meet him. Chris grew up in nearby Ulverston; he told me that he originally trained as a land surveyor, studying at Newcastle University. ‘Then I read that offshore survey companies were recruiting and I thought “that sounds quite interesting”.’ He took a job surveying for an offshore construction company, but then in 2011 saw that ABP in Barrow were advertising for hydrographical surveyors, so he applied and was accepted.

The Port Office is a red sandstone Victorian building, now almost hidden from its raison d’etre by a large office block built on an area where once there would have been warehouses and cranes. Barrow is still a large and important port and home to a ship- and submarine-building industry and Chris explained that the deep, straight channel from the docks, out past Walney Island, needs surveying ‘every few months, and dredging once a year, sometimes more’.

But as well as surveying the approaches to his home port, Chris goes up the Solway to Silloth. His first survey, using a multi-beam echo-sounder, was in early 2013. ‘We were using the [ABP’s] harbour tug, it’s 20 metres long with a 2.5 metre draught but we found it was affected by the strong currents and progress was very slow. Also we always work from Whitehaven, it’s just not viable to work from Silloth due to the limited access. We sometimes finish off on the last day in Silloth to survey the dock, but most of the work is done from Whitehaven, then the incoming tide pushes us towards the survey site, and the falling tide helps us on the way back.’

Despite the difficulties, they had good weather, and a good Spring tide; on that first survey, Chris said, they looked at a wider area than the pilotage channel to get a general idea about the surrounding sea-bottom.

A multibeam scanner sends out a broad fan-shaped pulse of sound, which bounces back, the length of the time delay creating a ‘picture’ of the topography of the sea-bed. Accurate postitioning of the device is necessary (eg by GPS), and the received signals have to be corrected for factors such as wave height, and pitch and yaw of the boat.

‘There are swathes of coverage, we try to overlap the corridors. The width of the beam is about four times the water depth – so the area scanned depends on water depth, it’s greater when there’s more water. Obviously, if you’re vertically above a spot, the beam has a smaller footprint, so you get greater detail. At Barrow, we do overlapping scans, so each bit gets done twice and this gives much greater resolution. But at Silloth this is too difficult, because of the currents and the limited access.’

The ways in which the scanner results can be displayed is impressive. I had already seen the large print-outs of the charts showing each recorded depth point. The chart below shows the position of the survey relative to the three buoys; the paler the colour, the deeper the water. For obvious reasons, the depth in metres is corrected to the depth of the Sill at the entrance to Silloth port.

September 2015 survey, with position of the 3 buoys marked

In Chris’s office we were able to look at multi-coloured 3D images on the computer, the colours relating to the measured depth. Images from different surveys could be stacked and tilted, to show changes in height of the seabed.

On these images, the colour range from red through yellow through green to blue indicates increasing depth.

January 2014 survey: rocky scaurs and sandwaves

Though not at the greatest possible resolution, the detail is excellent, showing the large regular sandwaves in the NW corner of the survey (for much more about sandwaves and sand-ripples see elsewhere on this blog). Parallel bands of unchanging material trending NE-SW near the southern-most part of the survey are probably part of the same rocky bands that form Dubmill and nearby scaurs; later surveys show them dotted with a scattering of boulders.

And of course, what was of greatest interest was to compare the position of the sandwaves and sandbanks relative to the pilotage channel throughout the three years of periodic surveys. Looking at the shifts in position of the red-orange (shallow, ie sandbanks) and blue-green (deeper) colours between January and September 2014, it’s easy to see how the sandbanks have been moved towards the East, filling in the channel.

from left to right: January 2014; September 2014; September 2015 (thanks to Chris Heppenstall and ABP)

Between September 2014 and September 2015, however, the sandbanks in the NE have been moved in a westerly direction again and the (green) channel is more extensive. In September 2015, there are obvious boulders (seen more clearly in the previous image) scattered over the surface of the rocky scars towards the South – probably revealed as sand has been swept away.

However, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence for the flat-bottomed channel which Ed had mentioned, and which I had surmised (and hoped) might be peat or clay. On reflection, peat would have been unlikely anyway, as the peat ‘horizon’ on the shore is much higher; but glacially-derived clay remains a possibility. The only relatively unchanging smooth area is to the very South of the surveys, seen in January and September 2014. Now what we need is a diver!

 

My grateful thanks to Chris Heppenstall of ABP for so generously sharing these data and images.

Snippets 8: A non-conformist on the shore

‘Brockram’ and ‘breccia’: the first word suggests something that is solid and long-lasting, the other has a hint of transience, of frippery. But Brockram is a form of breccia; it looks like a congealed and lumpy mess of porridge that has been spilled onto the shore.

It’s a non-conformity, it’s pretending to be older than it is.

The rope that leads to the shore

Shore-scramble

We had slithered down a slope of muddy red sandstone, with the ‘protection’ of a knotted rope fixed to an insubstantial metal stake, and had reached the shore of Barrowmouth Bay, a little to the North of St Bees’. Over the centuries, great boulders of the red St Bees’ sandstone have eroded from the high cliffs along this part of the coast, and have tumbled onto the shore. Large and slippery, often coated with green algae, they make progress along the shore difficult but always interesting, because one is forced to stop and look and feel and question the shapes and colours.

Rippled sandstone

Mica drifts in the sandstone

‘Load-clasts’ in sandstone

Some boulders have drifts of mica embedded in them, hinting that the delicate flakes were swirled by a river’s current into a small depression. Others have marks of ripples, that were formed on the bed of the river delta when the sandy sediments were deposited; still others have swellings or circular indentations, where stones or mud were pressed against the sediments as they were compressed and lithified, and turned to stone. (There is much more about Barrowmouth and St Bees’ sandstone on Solway Shore Stories.)

An anchor-stone?

 

I find a bright red stone that is perforated by a hole, the edges of which are scored with grooves. Are they marks worn by ropes, was it perhaps used as an anchor?

 

Most of the boulders are the New Red sandstone but they are tumbled upon rock from a much older age, a sandstone that is darker, purplish, in colour; there are patches too of a paler yellow-green variant. This is Carboniferous, ‘Coal-Measures’, sandstone within which the West Cumbrian coal-fields are embedded.

Finally we reach the rock that is an intruder. Even though the Brockram looks artificial and unattractive, out of place both aesthetically and geologically, it’s a special thing to see. It caps wave-washed boulders; it has spilled into crevices, and forms a smooth-topped platform over the sandstone; it is lumpy with gravel and pebbles.

Caps of Brockram

Layered upon the sandstone

Small inclusions

The colours of the Carboniferous limestone

Larger pebbles in the ‘porridge’

This ‘non-conformity’ and the way it arose is extraordinary. The surface of the Coal Measures sandstone had been smoothed and hollowed, slowly eroded as it was exposed and oxidised in the desert air – and then suddenly, into every dip and joint had poured this mess of Brockram, forming a dramatic contrast of colour and texture. In the Permo-Trias a river torrent had flashed out onto the sandstone, its powerful currents carrying a mixture of volcanic material, limestones, sandstone and even Ennerdale granite from the ‘Lake District’ region (which was then at about the latitude of the current Sahara desert), and had deposited this breccia in a fan.

It does not ‘conform’ because there is a gap in the geological record between the old sandstone and the younger breccia – the rock from the top of the Coal Measure sandstone had been eroded and removed.

We sit on the rocks and drink coffee, watching the sea, hearing the regular thump-thump-thump of an engine, a trawler unseen in the fog, heading West to the Irish Sea. Two oyster-catchers fly low over the water’s quiet surface, their wing-tips almost touching their mirrored reflections. A seal watches us and, unimpressed, sinks down into the water and disappears.

The tide is coming in and eventually, we leave this out-of-the-way and unusual place, to scramble back along the shore, haul ourselves up the rope, and climb the long steep path to the top of the cliff.

Brockram platform and low dolomitic limestone cliff

The path to Barrowmouth Bay

Piloting a ship up the Firth to Silloth

View from the Harbour Office window: Marshall Dock at low tide

You have probably never thought what  it would be like to pilot a ship: to be in charge of, say, a cargo vessel with a hold-full of sticky molasses, that is about to enter the narrow dock gates of a port. But imagine yourself as the pilot: you have boarded the ship as it approaches its destination in order to explain to the captain how to manoeuvre his ship at this, the end, of his current voyage. You are responsible for the safety of a very large and expensive piece of kit which doesn’t belong to you. And if you’re piloting the vessel to the Port of Silloth, you also have a trip of about 90 minutes ahead of you before you reach the port near the inner end of the Solway Firth.

“Only the Victorians could have thought this was a good place to put a port,” Ed Deeley says of Silloth. “To put the entrance at 90 degrees to the main flow!”

Ed took on the job of Harbour Master in 2011, though he tells me that piloting ships has always been what he most enjoys; when we meet he has just returned from a piloting job at Ayr. Unlike Ayr, Silloth can only be reached via some of the most changeable channels and, on occasion, the largest Spring tides around the British coast. Any ship longer than 50 metres is required by law to wait off the Port of Workington to take on a pilot before it can head to Silloth. Timing is crucial because the port at Silloth is tidal – the  depth of the water within the inner dock is maintained by lock gates – so the ship must arrive there just before high tide when the gates are open.

Looking N to Criffel; Dubmill Scar, the posts of the oyster lines; Ellison’s scar and sandbanks in the distance (photo: Andrew Lysser)

The Port of Silloth (photo: Ann Lingard)

 

Despite the multiple layers of difficulty – the weather, the sea-state, the shifting channels, the time constraints, the angle of entry – Ed Deeley enjoys the challenge: “All these different factors – you’re trying to juggle them all!” Chris Puxley, the former Harbour Master and also a pilot, once told me that negotiating the entrance to Marshall Dock always provided “a gentle adrenalin rush”.

The Derwent leaving harbour (my thanks to Colin Sharpe, Port Development Manager, for the use of this photo)

The Derwent in Workington harbour (photo: Ann Lingard)

But the first job of a pilot is to board, and learn about, the ship. The pilot boat Derwent takes him out from Workington to the waiting ship, where he goes straight up to the bridge to meet the Master. Both Chris Puxley and former pilot Bill Amyes have previously told me stories about their experiences in The ship’s pilot’s story , but I was keen to meet Ed and get an update on piloting and the port itself.

Unlike many Harbour Masters, Ed dresses informally, no blazer or peaked cap, and he doesn’t like to be referred to as ‘Captain Deeley’; he smilingly hints that some of the Masters might find this a little unusual. Despite this, he needs to find out about the ship (“The captain knows his ship, we don’t”), and there’s an important check list to complete: the stability of the ship, the types of equipment, whether the anchors are free (“sometimes they’re cemented in place and you don’t want to be hammering at them to get them free if you really need them”). And there is the Passage Plan: the pilot discusses the course with the captain, and explains, with the use of diagrams, what will happen when they reach Silloth.

Ed Deeley, Harbour Master, looking at bathymetric surveys of the channel

Check list for the Passage Plan

 

Then, they are ready for the journey up the Firth, keeping to the ‘English Channel’ amongst the sandbanks and the ‘Changeable Depths’. From an aerial point of view of the Firth during the low water of a ‘big’ Spring tide, it’s obvious why a pilot is necessary – and why frequent bathymetric surveys need to be carried out on the channel: rocky scaurs project out into the Firth, and the whale-backs of sandbanks are pale against the glistening sea.

Detail of  Admiralty Chart to show the three buoys that mark the channel (note ‘Changeable Depths’). Photo: Ann Lingard

 

At the North end of Allonby Bay the course is marked by buoys. “Between Solway Buoy [off Dubmill Point] and Corner Buoy, it’s a critical region, the region that gives us the most trouble,” Ed tells me. “At Corner Buoy there’s a narrow corridor, that channel is our window – to the East of it are big boulders, the shrimp fishermen won’t go there, to the West are shifting sands. So we have to head North to North-West between the two sandbanks, then North-East towards the Beckfoot buoy.”

The ‘trouble’ is due to the shifting sands. “After the winter storms of 2014/15 we had it surveyed, and a lot of sand had moved around. The channel by Corner Buoy had been 3.8 metres deep and it had gone to just 1.3 metres deep. The sandbanks had spilled over. We need at least 1.3 metres by the Solway Buoy because there are boulders and rocks, so it was an awful situation.”

But interestingly, the survey, using multibeam sonar which is accurate enough to pick up details of sand-ripples, showed that for two or three cables (1) the bottom of the corridor – although less than half-a-kilometre wide – had remained unchanged.

“To the West were sharp sand-waves six to seven metres high, with channels or trenches between them,” Ed says, “but the bottom of the corridor looks smooth, it’s quite linear. They reckon the sand can’t take a hold.”

This is fascinating. We discuss whether this could be a peat-bank, like those sometimes exposed beneath the sand and shingle on the shore. Or a thick layer of boulder-clay or glacial till? Both those substrata are smooth and fairly stable. (Ed gave me the address of the surveyor at Barrow – there will be more information in due course.)

Waiting for a tow: Solway, Beckfoot and Corner Buoys and their IBCs, March 2016

Every major storm sequence causes changes, and not only to the sea-bed and shore. This winter, 2015/16, Beckfoot Buoy was swept away: three new buoys are currently (March 2016) lined up against a harbour wall, awaiting a tug from Barrow to tow them and their anchors, the IBCs (2) filled with concrete, out to their new positions.

Not just the sea, but the rivers too

While attention is naturally concentrated on the effect of the storms on land, few people think of the effects on our ports and rivers – and the consequent enormous costs to the port authorities of the clean-up. The storms’ aftermath has seen enormous quantities of silt and débris such as tree-trunks brought down by the rivers, as well as dramatic changes to the profiles of the shores. At Silloth, sediment that builds up in the outer Dock, can be flushed out at low tide by opening sluices in the New Dock gates.

The BORR in Maryport harbour (thanks to Danny Ferris for allowing me to use this photo))

Dredger ‘Contender’ at entrance to Port of Workington (my thanks to Danny Ferris for this photo)

Dredger ‘Grete’ at Port of Workington (my thanks to Danny Ferris for this photo)

redgers Grete & Contender off Workington (my thanks to Danny Ferris for this photo)

At Maryport, a specialist dredger, the BORR,  was working throughout March, blasting the mudbanks with high-pressure water-jets, so that the stirred-up sediment was carried out with the tide. At Workington, two different types of dredger have worked at the mouth of the River Derwent and in the port’s turning basin for almost two months, scooping or sucking up the sediment and carrying it out to sea. Their  activities have been followed by Danny Ferris and John Forrester, whose websites Solway Shipping and Cumbria Ship Photos,  respectively, provide valuable insights into the workings of the West Cumbrian ports.

Entering Silloth docks

The Passage Plan

Marked-up Passage Plan for the Port of Silloth, with diagrams to show the passage of the ship

The entrance to Marshall Dock is at right-angles to the tidal flow: difficult at any tide but especially so when the biggest Spring tides – potentially 9-10 metres at high water – are running. Entry must be at high water when the tidal flow is at its minimum, but “there’s no slack water at Silloth”, Ed says. “There’s a counter-current, especially on the big tides, just off the port entrance – it rips in the opposite direction. And there’s a ‘top run’ where it ebbs earlier at the entrance.” Pencilled diagrams on Ed’s Passage Plans give graphic explanations of the ship’s potential movements.

‘We stop the ship three cables off the entrance and wait for the tide to drop off, then I’m aiming at West Beach, crabbing in – the counter-current off the entrance is pushing the stern in the opposite direction even as the bow is inside the dock.”

Entering the dock presents different problems, too. “When you enter  a narrow channel, there’s a hydraulic effect, the water speeds up under the ship. It’s asymmetrical and unbalances the ship. Then you enter New Dock, which is the shallowest point and the hydraulic effect increases. The flow underneath causes the ship to ‘squat’ – it sits lower in the water, it becomes deeper.”

New Dock isn’t huge, and there may be other vessels there already, ranging from scallop-boats and trawlers to cargo vessels, taking up space along the quays.

Celtica Hav enters Marshall Dock at high tide

Celtica Hav entering Marshall Dock

Celtica Hav starting to turn

Dwarfed by molasses-tanker Zapadnyy

Celtica Hav, now turned around, approaching the lairage

 

“We get into the dock and then we have to turn the ship. The captain needs to tell us how the ship behaves when going astern – it’s an effect of the propellors – whether the ship tends to swing port or starboard.” Tricky enough on a calm day, but even harder when there’s a strong wind and the space is limited. Tricky at night, when the two onshore leading lights must be lined up for the correct angle to approach the gates (see Master’s Passage Plan diagram above). And even trickier when the vessel being piloted is the Zapadnyy.

If you are now realising a little of what piloting a ship entails, enjoy considering the Zapadnyy. This cargo vessel carries molasses, for use in animal feed; molasses presents a special problem because it must not be allowed to get too cold or too warm. I first heard about her in connection with some emergency welding that had to be carried out on the dock, and all the pilots have stories to tell about her.  “She’s unmanoeuvrable!” (Bill Amyes); “It’s anybody’s guess which way she’s going to go” (Ed Deeley); “She’s got such a broad beam. It’s like trying to steer a coracle” (Chris Puxley).

But Ed also adds, “She’s a Bulgarian bunker barge. She’s got a very competent bridge team as well as a very good echo-sounder! And she’s the only vessel that manages to keep molasses in a good state.”

The Zapadnyy, unloading warm molasses through a pipe (photo: Ann Lingard)

 

(1) A cable length is 180m

(2) IBS: Intermediate Bulk Container

There are more stories about the Port of Silloth and Ships’ Pilots on Solway Shore Stories.

The Walls of Parton

On top of the wall

‘Are you looking for the old port?’

The man seemed to have appeared from nowhere, yet he was tall and strongly built, white hair sticking up straight, not easy to overlook.

‘Port?’ I was bemused – I’d been poking at pink Corallina fringing a pool.

A wet black labrador jumped up at me, whining, tail thrashing, a long stick protruding each side of his mouth. I took the stick and threw it, my hand slipping on the glutinous slobber.

‘There was a port here in the 1700s, it was built to take the coal from Parton to Dublin. If you go down there across the rocks—‘he pointed to where a flat tongue of sandstone jutted into the sea, ‘you’ll just be able to see some remains of the walls. And there’s a few dressed blocks of stone lying round down there, too.’

Until then, I had had no idea that Parton had been a port. The man then told me about fossil plants in the mudstone, and how he and his daughter had picked up about 20 specimens in half-an-hour. My husband joined us and told the man about a large ‘trace fossil’ – feeding marks possibly made by a sedentary worm – that we had just found in a boulder by the car-park. I had been collecting sea-weed, and the man told me about the channel wrack on the rocks nearby. He was a retired zoologist; we chatted some more, shook hands and said ‘Well met’, and the man and his dog strolled away across the shore.

‘Trace fossil’ of Zoophycos in limestone defences

The sea-defences at the top of the shore

Parton is just to the North of Whitehaven, where coal has been mined for at least three centuries. In the late 17^th century and early 18^th century Parton was apparently a busy and thriving town. There were two tanneries, a glassworks, a saltpan, and also considerable business associated with coal. All this I discovered later when we left the shore for the Wagon Way, where there is an information board and an audio system that will not be silenced after you have pressed the button; its calm, reasonable voice continues to echo from the cliff even after you’ve bidden it goodbye.

Two ages of sandstone

Slag banks and sea-defences

Slag and the shore

The rocky shore that edges the village is a mixture of the geological and industrial past so common on this stretch of coast, where coal-mining and steel-making once guided the economy and peoples’ lives. In places the sand and shingle have been washed away to expose hard banks of ash and embedded coloured, gaseous pebbles, the slag from the Bessemer converters which was poured onto the shore. Piles of limestone boulders, brought from inland quarries, have been mounded at the shore’s upper margin to protect the land from the sea’s battering; the curved fossil shells within them – bivalves, brachiopods – show the marine origin of the rock.

And the ‘country rock’ of the shore is old, Carboniferous sandstone, both purple and creamy-yellow, in flat plates and ridges, bored into by the waves to form deep alga-fringed pools. Surfaces and crevices are coated with barnacles, mussels, gaggles of Littorina, and the tall-shelled limpets indicative of an exposed, wave-pounded shore.

A line of Littorina littorea

Encrustation by tubes of the honeycomb worm Sabellaria

This rocky shore-scape is so different from the sandy expanses further up the Cumbrian coast. Here at Parton are algae of all colours coating the rocks and pools, providing a richness of habitats for intertidal animals. There are encrusting patches of tubes of the honeycomb worm, Sabellaria. Foot-marks and ‘teeth’-marks on the smooth rock betray the wandering, feeding activity of winkles and limpets when the tide comes in: incipient ‘trace-fossils’.

The radula-marks of feeding limpets

Footmarks of winkle, Littorina

There are other rocks, too, sea-smoothed pebbles and boulders: different-coloured sandstones, Carboniferous and New Red, coal, and slate. There are more clues about former lives and endeavours: the sea sorts them into bands along the shore – fragments of decorated china and lumps of thick green glass scoured by the sand, the base of a bottle with ‘WHITEH’ in raised glassy letters, cloudy green marbles from bottle-stoppers.

Clues to former lives

As so often, a chance encounter – this time with one man and his wet dog – brings questions, this time about the vanished port. The main players were Lamplugh, Fletcher, and Lowther, then as now a major land-owner: Lowther already had a suitable port and quay at Whitehaven, but feared the competition from Lamplugh’s proposed quay at Parton.

What a long psychological and verbal battle was stirred up between them by the necessity to export coal – coal from coastal pits like Lowca and Moresby and Saltom – easily and cheaply by sea. There had previously been a small harbour at Parton which was damaged by storms and barely usable. Lamplugh arranged for the pier to be ‘re-built’ between 1695-8, and – of course – the re-built pier was considerably bigger than before, and a certain amount of dredging and re-arranging of the outlet of a beck was required to improve the harbour. In 1705, the First Parton Harbour Act was passed in Lamplugh’s favour; followed by Acts 2 and 3 in 1724 and 1732, all of which permitted the raising of funds for the continuance and upkeep of the harbour by the levy of dues on ships. The twists and turns, the Acts and weasel-words, are recounted in delightful detail by David Bradbury in the online background material for his book, Parton Part One.

But in the end, it was the Solway’s wild waves that eventually finished off the harbour and the export business. In February 1796 a tremendous storm thrashed the West coast of Britain, and Parton’s port was totally destroyed, its sandstone quay swept away, the bay’s sandbanks and shingle shifted and redistributed. Where there is now a piece of flat ground and the War Memorial, on the village side of the railway, there was once a harbour.

After the man and his dog had left, I looked for remnants of the harbour wall, but the sea had already covered them for there was nothing to be seen beneath the silty incoming tide.

A tunnel to the shore

With the loss of the port as its hub, it seems that Parton went into a decline. The village, hidden at the base of the great red cliffs, is unseen from the main coastal road, and the shore is hidden from the village behind a high red wall that is punctuated by a few low tunnels through which a car, or horse and wagon, might drive, carefully, to the shoreward side. The clues to the reason for this wall are high above, spiky silhouettes of gantries with signals, and warning signs: the embankment carries the coastal railway on which Parton is a request stop.

A Sunday train heads South

It’s Sunday and several men in high-vis jackets are chatting, and clattering with metal tools, on the line. Later, we watch the two-coach train creeping round the foot of the distant headland and then, unrequested, passing through the station, continuing quietly to Whitehaven.

We pass through another tunnel under the railway, back into the village. There are more high sandstone walls, some of the stones show cross-stratification, the lines of intersecting underwater sandbanks; square holes are inhabited by jackdaws who turn their heads to peer down at us; two rusty hinge-supports give away the presence of a bricked-up door, behind which there is the sound of rushing water. These stone walls are the artificial face of the cliff, built to restrain the soil and shale from slipping down onto the street.

A Parton sandstone wall

Jackdaw dwelling, decorated for Spring

Cross-bedded sandstone blocks

From a higher vantage point we look down onto the roofs of houses and into their backyards, a view that takes in the railway, the bay, and distant Moresby church and Hall, and that is still – with notable absences – recognisable from Percy Kelly’s paintings and drawings. Author Chris Wadsworth records that in an interview in 1964 Kelly ‘said there was an urgency in drawing and painting [Parton] because it was disappearing as he worked. In fact the council were demolishing a lot of the old houses which were unfit for habitation and relocating people to the new housing estate on top of the hill.’

The cover of Chris Wadsworth’s guide: Parton seen from the South

Kelly was born further up the coast at Workington in 1918, and  his extraordinary story has been told by Chris Wadsworth, who as a former gallery owner in Cockermouth has done more than anyone to bring Kelly’s works and life to our notice. He was a difficult man – paranoid, narcissistic, hypochondriac, arrogant, twice married, befriended by the rich and famous, cross-dresser (long before Grayson Perry, and while living in a rural area in less-tolerant times) … He was a man who inspired many unflattering epithets, but whose works, including his now-famous illustrated letters, have become highly sought-after and enormously admired.

Kelly was also, for a while, a friend of Millom poet Norman Nicholson; the dwellings, works and harbours of the industrial coast of Cumbria inspired them both. His drawings and paintings of this area are visual echoes of Nicholson’s 1943 poem Whitehaven :

‘… suburbs like a waking beast

Hoist their backbones to the east,

And pitheaps at the seaward gate

Build barricades against the light.

Deep as trenches streets are dug

beneath entanglements of fog …’

Parton isn’t on a ‘tourist route’. While we are there, the shore is busy only with locals walking their dogs; a lone fisherman waits for sea-bass.

Waiting for sea-bass as the tide comes in

But a new guide to Parton, one of several ‘Percy Kelly Trails’ researched and designed by Chris Wadsworth, might persuade enthusiasts for the artist’s works and life to visit the village and search for the buildings and views which inspired him.

Our intention – the reason we have come to Parton – is to search for those plant fossils that the man had mentioned. We head South towards Whitehaven along the Wagon Way, a smooth track once used by horses hauling coal and now ideal for cyclists, walkers, buggy-pushers.

We are distracted by more red walls: low walls against the cliff’s base, and a waist-high wall above the railway embankment, curving around the headland in the distance.

Walls: Wagon Way and railway lead where the horizon fades into the sky

 

The walls demand our time, our attention; they are so perfectly constructed of blocks, some as much as a metre long and 300cm high. Red sandstone, St Bees’ stone, probably quarried from the cliff between Parton and Whitehaven, then transported to where it was needed; the block faces cut and dressed and worked to almost perfect squares and rectangles.

Quarry between Parton & Whitehaven

Quarry – and other structures

 

Mica flakes glitter, green algae smear the surface; here and there the exposed surface has been deeply eroded. Imagine the difficult and unsafe work that went into the quarrying and transporting of the stone; the cutting, the dressing, the lifting and placing of all those stones. There are holes in the blocks that would have been used for swinging them into place. How many men, how long, did it take for the walls of Parton to be built?

Eroded sandstone

Looking North along a wall

Guttural quacking draws attention to pairs of fulmars, raising their necks in bonding display, high above on rocky ledges. The site we are looking for is part-way up their cliff, a dark patch of shale-y mudstone, formed millions of years ago when a stream in spate burst its banks and deposited metres of fine mud onto surrounding vegetation. To get to it we must climb over a wall and fight along an indistinct muddy track, up through brambles and briars and last year’s pale nettle stalks. But we are Prepared: we have secateurs and an old piton-hammer that has found new use as a geological hammer. And then, several metres below our objective there is a landslip, a talus slope of mudstone flakes, within some of which are embedded smooth dark shapes – single perfectly-preserved leaves, stems fringed with leaves, straight ridged stalks.

Each tiny plant is as delicate as gold-leaf that has been stroked onto a substrate with a paint-brush.

Plant fossils pressed within the layers

Later, as we walk back along the Wagon Way, the narrowing strip of shore below is empty of people, but as we turn the corner onto Main Street a wolfhound as tall as a miniature horse ambles towards us. He is neither wet nor carrying a stick. His owner tells us, ‘He’s lazy, he’d rather lie on the sofa all day.’