Walduck's Wall

Gus and I did the circular walk again from Wolf House over Heald Brow and along the coast to Jenny Brown's Point and Jack Scout, attracted as ever by the sun setting in Morecambe Bay. I keep intending to blip the old smelter chimney at Jenny Brown's silhouetted against the sun (see extra taken last week), though today there was a party of archaeologists with cones and netting beginning an excavation there.

So instead we have a view into the Bay across the remnants of Walduck's Wall. When I first took photos here, I did not know the story of the attempted reclamation in the 19th century of a large chunk of the Bay south from the Jenny Brown's. After two years of extending a wall of quarried limestone out into the Bay, the scheme was abandoned in late 1879. It was defeated essentially by the Bay itself and its powerful processes of tides, currents, erosion and channel movements. The man in charge of the operation, Captain Muller, had been killed earlier that year in an accident with the horse and wagon taking stone out to tip at the growing point of the wall. Costs spiralled, the investors pulled out and the reclamation was abandoned.

The Bay would indeed be a very different place today had that scheme been successful, yet strangely the eroding relics of the wall and other infrastructure are now a photogenic element of the coastal landscape. And this afternoon, there was an influx of tripod men set up and static in front of the scene.  At about the point this was taken, one of the tripod men said to another something to the effect that the best sky was in the east behind our heads. What more did he want?

What I wanted was for Harry the Heron to turn up and stalk along the edge of the channel, but he didn't show today.

Back blipped on 13 November