When travelling north from Lancaster station, I always try to sit on the left side of the train because it affords the best view of two sites I’m always pleased to see.

The first of these is the River Lune as it wends its way towards Sunderland Point and the Irish Sea.

The second, which comes into view just beyond Bare Lane, is the broad, level expanse of Morecambe Bay – that ‘majestic plain’, as Wordsworth has it, ‘from which the sea has retired’.

The name Morecambe, so I’m told, means ‘sea-crook’ or ‘sea-bend’, and this goes some way towards describing the bent arc of the Bay’s foreshore.

This crooked shape is chiefly caused by the rivers Lune, Kent and Leven, whose estuaries merge here with the waters of the Keer, Wyre and Winster to form one vast plain comprising some 120 square miles of saltmarshes, mudflats and intertidal channels.

The Lancashire poet Edwin Waugh spoke of this coastline as a scene of rich and varied beauty: a panorama of ‘changeful picturesqueness’ marked by an ‘exquisite variety of form and colour’.

Waugh’s words appeal to me, because I’m fascinated by railways and he was a tourist of the first great railway age.

His little book was published in 1860, just three years after the completion of the Ulverstone [sic] and Lancaster Railway.

Waugh’s subject is not so much Morecambe Bay itself, but the Bay as seen from the window of a railcar.

But one of the more intriguing aspects is that it’s also a swansong for an earlier age of trans-Bay travel.

Before the coming of the railway, as Waugh well knew, the most direct line linking Lancaster to the Lake District was the ‘over-sands’ route: a journey of some 20 miles, which involved fording the Kent and Leven estuaries at low tide.

From Lancaster, this route ran three miles to Hest Bank and then proceeded some seven-nine miles over the mudflats to either Kents Bank or Cart Lane, on the Allithwaite shore.

From here, it extended over land to Sandgate, near Flookburgh, whence it cut across the mouth of the Leven to Sandside, near Ulverston.

By 1810, a shorter route between Cark and Ulverston Canal Foot was also in regular use.

In either instance the passage could be treacherous, and not simply because of the Bay’s quicksands and tidal bores.

In poor weather, especially on misty evenings, unwary travellers perished simply because they failed to find their way back to shore.

The deaths of the 23 cockle pickers who drowned near Hest Bank ten years ago are a grim reminder of a long list of fatalities extending back beyond the 16th century.

Yet, right up to the mid-1800s, the cross-bay route remained a main thorough-fare for travellers to pass swiftly between Lancaster and the Lake District.

By 1781, during the great age of picturesque tourism in the Lakes, there was an over-sands coach service running six days a week, promising a ‘sober and careful driver’ and an ‘expeditious’ crossing.

Even in the tamer age of Lakeland travel, some 60 years later, the perils of the old route lived on in local memory, inspiring stories such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Sexton’s Hero’ (1848), a harrowing tale of a young couple’s misadventure on the sands.

My evening commute takes me past the very spot where Gaskell’s story is set, poignantly, near where those 23 cocklers drowned.

And as I look out, like Waugh before me, from the comfort and safety of a railcar, I can’t help but think of all the history those sands have swallowed up.