170 Sea Sands 



uncertain qualities of utility and menace as above it. 

 In many wide, sandy bays, especially on the deeply 

 indented western coast-line, the broad sands at low 

 water provide a serviceable highway from shore to 

 shore. They are marked by definite crossings or 

 passages originally followed by foot-passengers and 

 strings of pack-horses, but available for wheeled 

 traffic. Some of the most regular of these routes, 

 but little used now, since the improvement of roads 

 and the development of railways on the mainland, 

 are those across the estuaries of the Duddon and 

 Leven, and the broad Lancaster sands in the north- 

 east of Morecambe Bay. From Hest Bank on the 

 east to Kents Bank on the west is a crossing of about 

 eight miles, as compared with sixteen by the railway, 

 which skirts the shore, and much more by a network 

 of circuitous by-roads. In fair weather such tracts 

 of firm, plain sand made a pleasant highway ; but 

 the shores of all such tracts are as full of traditions 

 of disaster as the neighbourhood of high snow 

 mountains. Fog and an exceptionally strong and 

 sudden tide are two great causes of disaster on the 

 sands ; and when the traveller strays, there are the 

 quicksands. 



The strip about high- water mark on a range of 

 sand-dunes is full of the fascination of a curious and 

 exceptional vegetation, and the flotsam and jetsam 

 of the sea. On the western shores, lengths of rough 

 bamboo and strips of brightly coloured matting lie 

 entangled in sea-weed and gulls' feathers along the 

 sinuous water-line ; and along the Channel and 

 North Sea coast we find now and then a split wooden 



