
So, a litany of place-names on an OS map of Cockerham Marsh and the Lancashire Coastal Path evoking those who fished and farmed here and wildlife whose place they shared.
There's Glasson Marsh and Fishnet Point. Sand Side looks out to Cockerham Sands. Fluke Hall and Worm Pool Fisher’s Row Moss Side Peartree Grove. So, what was for supper?
At the dissolution of Cockerham Abbey I wonder who seized upon prized blocks of masonry to use for themselves in farmstead, barn and wall. All that stone will have been put to good use, locally, I suspect.
Bank Houses caravan park has a defensive sea wall at Banks End. I wonder if the sea ever floods over the salt marsh to reach sea-wall backed by a grassy embankment. Once such farmsteads would have been islets in the marsh, over the centuries it's been drained for farmland and we walk muddy, puddled lanes where tall stalks of maize brush against us, the crop taken.
Moss Edge, Moss Edge Farm, Moss House Farm, Thurnham Moss, Moss Grove, Moss Wood,
Herons Wood, Weasel Wood, Crow Wood,
Plover Scar, Plover Hill, flocks gathered on the shoals of Cockerham Sands and I wonder which species of plover Scar and Hill are named for. We're too far off to identify birds but I hear curlew, redshank and oystercatcher. And a heron stood stately by a lock on the Glasson Canal.
Flood Gates show along the coast. There's Tithe Barn and Brick Kiln Bridge
Salt oak? What might that mean. ( question marks they come so thick and fast I give up})
There are place names so odd I haven't no idea what they might mean. I like to think the fishing and farming community on Cockerham Marsh were so in tune with the wildlife with which they shared salt marsh and mosses that they named places for these creatures. A life shared. Not like us in the anthropocene when woods are destroyed and roads named after the trees felled, as if we can't live with them, or without them. Trees shed leaves and some people object, forgetting they also give us the oxygen we breathe.
As we walk through Glasson we see spiders lurking in their webs and long strands of spider silk strung across foliage in gardens. John Edmondson hopes to photograph his group but some of us are distracted by a butterfly hot-spot, the purple flowers of sedum that attract small tortoiseshell, a red admiral, fast-fluttering moths ahostof bees and hoverflies. By the shore, someone spies a tortoiseshell struggling to free itself from a spider's web whilst the spider wraps it in silken threads. Sunlight gleams on the sea where waders take flight and we agree this is the loveliest part of our day.