The car park at the start is an excellent spot to observe bird life (though at high tide the shingle beach is often completely covered by water, so time your walk correctly). The cluster of cottages on this remote peninsula recalls 17th-century trading days when transatlantic ships sailed up the River Lune to Lancaster carrying sugar, tobacco, rum, ginger, raw cotton wool from America, and mahogany from the West Indies.
Because shoals and shallow water made the Lune difficult for seagoing vessels, ships were unloaded and loaded at Sunderland Point at the river mouth, with cotton wool stored in warehouses now converted into cottages. Anchoring offshore, sailors nicknamed the harbour 'Cape Famine' due to the complete lack of a pub.
Profits from African, American, and West Indian trade built fine Georgian buildings in Lancaster, but as the estuary silted up Sunderland Point was superseded by Glasson Dock on the opposite bank. Popular as a bathing place in the early 1800s, it was later overtaken by Morecambe with the arrival of the railway.
Along the old harbour edge stands Cotton Tree Cottage (once home to a Lancaster sea captain) and Cotton Tree Barn, outside which grows a gnarled old cotton tree (actually a black poplar whose seeds resemble cotton). Just beyond is Sunderland Hall — an elegant colonial-style house with verandas dating from 1683, the home of Quaker merchant Robert Lawson who first proposed using Sunderland Point as an extension to Lancaster's port.
Beyond Sunderland Hall the walk continues on shingle and sand of the foreshore around the headland (where yellow broom and pink wild thyme flourish and black-headed gulls fly overhead). A rough track runs alongside salt marshes past Heysham Nuclear Power Station towards views of the Lake District hills across Morecambe Bay.
A wooden signpost points to a field housing Sambo's Grave, commemorating a black slave who arrived with his sea captain master in 1735 and died shortly after from a fever.
Along the route you may encounter outdoor art installations: Ray Schofield's controversial 'Birds' sculpture (removed by the council following an anonymous complaint over lack of planning permission, prompting local petitions) and the 'Horizon Line Chamber' by Chris Drury — a conical stone chamber resembling an upturned boat that uses a self-contained lens to invert the outside world onto its lime-plastered walls, capturing the changing conditions of Morecambe Bay and its bird life in a transformed perspective (Source: ArtUK).
Acknowledgment: Text derived from the Out and Out Series; Discovering the Countryside on Foot. Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia.
