Lancashire
Glasson & Cockersand
Start/Finish 1
Glasson Dock pay & display car park
GR: SD446560
Go L. Opposite Victoria Inn, cross lock; follow Tithebarn Hill E then S to junction at Old Glasson. Go R down Marsh Lane; at 2nd gate bear R between hawthorns, then L to Janson Pool. Across footbridge follow track to Crook Farm.
2
Follow embankment L. At Lighthouse Cottage, kissing gate leads to path along embankment. Pass Plover Scar, Cockersands Abbey and Cockerham Sands Observation Tower to reach Bank Houses.
3
Follow road E 900m to T-junction; go L (N). Follow road R to Hillam Farm. L on public footpath past farm building, through four gates then two stiles to Norbreck Farm. R then L through farmyard, ahead toward trig point, R then L round pond to gate. Cross field ahead, L at spring then R to stile and footbridge. Cross bridge, go L, cross stile, field, footbridge, field, stile; go R to Moss Lane. Go R for
1.4km to A588.
4
Go R to bus stop, cross road to Thurnham Hall. Go L, in front of house; follow walkway to car park. Cross stile, field, stile; bear R to Bailey Bridge. Cross bridge and stile; go L (NW); follow towpath 2km back to start.
including lepers. The hospital was later enlarged to become first a priory and finally an abbey. There are sandstone walls, sandstone cottages and farmhouses, sandstone erratics, a sandstone embankment, outcrops of sandstone on the shore. Miles across the empty desolation of Morecambe Bay, Furness Abbey is sandstone, as is much of Piel Castle, a stronghold on Piel Island built in the early 14th Century by John Cockerham, Abbot of Furness, to control shipping and trade in the area. Further around the coast, the Irish Sea batters the exposed sandstone of St Bees Head.
On my walk there were no raging seas or rugged mountains but there was a great deal of beauty: views of the Lakeland hills; seabirds and hares on the saltgrass; tides; silence; the brooding bulk of the Bowland Fells behind; and, in front, huge, empty Morecambe Bay. There was the lighthouse at Plover Scar, named for the migrating golden plover that feed here in winter; the mysterious Cockerham Sands Observation Tower (of uncertain purpose, and not shown on OS maps). There was even a hill: the trig point at Norbreck is at a dizzying 23m. To cap it all, I relished a final pleasant amble past Jacobean Thurnham Hall and back to the start along the canal. If only the Mill at Conder Green had been open for coffee...
Religious hermits knew all about going without – and about social isolation. But for all their yearning for solitude, the Brothers and Sisters of those distant times were busy with complex social networks – spiritual, financial, political. Today the Bay is an empty, forbidden wilderness but in the past a network of Friar– guides led travellers between the Bay’s religious houses – Furness, Conishead, Cartmel, Cockersand.
I’d left Glasson at 6am and, given the hour, the virus, the lack of noise from the motorway or the railway line, and the absence of planes in the sky, I couldn’t help but wonder if the mouth of the Lune was about as quiet as it had been in the days of Hugh the Hermit.
The only substantial remnant of Cockersand Abbey is the chapter house; the rest has been purloined for the construction of farm buildings over the centuries. What’s sad about this walk is to see dozens of ancient farm buildings, beautifully constructed of hand-hewn sandstone, slowly disintegrating amidst a mass of flatpack corrugated barns.