Across the sands of the Bay, by A Special Correspondent
An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
This report appeared in a Lancashire newspaper in 1877. At low tide, travellers could cross the wide sands of Morecambe Bay on foot or by cart, led by an official guide.
There are few excursions within reach of our northern towns that offer the visitor so much novelty for so little expense as the passage of the sands, and on Saturday last I joined a party of some thirty persons who proposed to walk across the Bay from Hest Bank to Kents Bank, a distance of nine miles, under the direction of the guide. We assembled on the shore at eleven, the tide having turned, and a merrier company could not be imagined: clerks from Lancaster, two schoolmistresses, a family from Bradford with a perambulator, and a young gentleman in a straw hat who announced that he had walked up Ingleborough twice and feared nothing.
The guide, Mr Hesketh, is a broad, weather-darkened man of few words, who has held his office for twenty years and whose father held it before him. He looked over the company without visible pleasure, desired the ladies to take off their boots, and set off at a pace which left the young gentleman in the straw hat some distance behind before the first mile was done. The sands at first are firm and ribbed like the roof of a mouth, and shine with a thin film of water that reflects the sky so perfectly that one appears to be walking upon clouds. Larks sang above us. The Bradford children shrieked with delight. It was, for an hour, the most agreeable walk in England.
Then a mist came in from the sea. It came without warning, as such mists do here, and within ten minutes the hills of Furness, which had been plain before us, were gone, and the company had shrunk to a little ring of grey figures standing in a white room without walls. The laughter stopped. Mr Hesketh walked ahead to the first of the branches of laurel which he plants each week to mark the safe way, and called us on, and we followed his voice from branch to branch as children follow a lantern.
At the channel of the Kent, where the river runs out across the sands, the water was above our knees and running hard, and here the young gentleman in the straw hat, having strayed a few yards from the line, sank suddenly to the waist in quicksand. I shall not easily forget the sound he made. Mr Hesketh reached him in a moment, laid his staff across the surface, and drew him out, minus one boot, with the calm of a man lifting a cat from a water butt. Not a word of reproach was spoken. None was needed.
We came ashore at Kents Bank at a quarter past three, wet, hungry and in the highest spirits, and the young gentleman bought the guide a glass of ale. I recommend the excursion heartily to any reader in want of a day’s pleasure. I recommend with equal earnestness that he never attempt it without the guide. The sands are beautiful, and they are patient, and every year they take someone who did not believe it.
“The writer wants readers to see the crossing of the sands as a thrilling adventure rather than a serious danger.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.