• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The map makes it clear: ‘WARNING – Public rights of way across Morecambe Bay are dangerous. Seek local guidance.’ Signs on the bank make it equally plain: ‘Do not attempt to cross without the Official Guide.’ Since 1963, that’s meant digging out Cedric Robinson, the Queen’s Guide to the Sands, a post that dates back to the sixteenth century. It comes with an honorarium of £15 a year, the tenancy of Guides Farm, overlooking the sands at Kents Bank, and a modicum of danger: at least one of his predecessors has drowned on the job. Using nothing more sophisticated than a lifetime’s knowledge, a stick and a whistle, Cedric steers some 10,000 people a year across, mainly on charity walks (it seems to be today’s version of the Lyke Wake Walk, which is reason enough to be cautious). The designated route of the path on the map is irrelevant, as the river channels and quicksands are in a state of constant flux; every crossing is different. When the railway first arrived, numbers crossing the sands plummeted. Tramps continued to use it, however, and sometimes the Queen’s Guide of the day was known to give a tramp the rail fare to get across, so that he wouldn’t have to bother. This became something of a legend in the tramping fraternity, and others soon showed up in some number to claim their free pennies.

Should it still be marked on the OS? I’m not sure that it should, for it must invite people to think that it’s more passable than it really is. I tried walking out where it’s marked on the map, and couldn’t get further than a couple of hundred yards before coming across wobbly sands, apparently firm bits that suddenly gave way and treacherous, fast-flowing channels of water. When the first local authority definitive maps were being drawn up in the early 1950s, the path wasn’t included, but the local secretary of the Ramblers’ Association lodged an objection, which was upheld. When the route was reclassified in the early 1990s, there were suggestions that it should, for the sake of both safety and wildlife, be extinguished, but again rambling fundamentalists, glued to their dogma of once a path, always a path, managed to stop the idea after a lengthy, and expensive, public enquiry. Perhaps the most avid amongst them could exercise their right with a lovely Boxing Day walk on the path that they’ve so bravely saved. Sticking to the exact line on the map, of course. And without Cedric.

Not only are we surrounded by water, internally we drip and gush from every pore. Fly over Britain and it’s the sunlight suddenly glancing off the surface of so many rivers, canals and lakes that both impresses and moves us the most. On a global scale, our rivers – and indeed all of our natural features – are tiny, but within our own insular microcosm, they are mighty.

Being the capital’s grubby sewer, and the waterway in which we are most encouraged to admire our national reflection, the Thames is the river that bags most of our national adulation. The only consolation for those of us infected with an inverted snobbery against southern England is that, however much it is lauded and loved, the Thames will never be as long as the Severn. It will always be in second place. There are many in Ireland who have the same pride that the Shannon trumps both of Britain’s major rivers.

Both the Thames and the Severn have named paths following them, but it is the Thames Path that has been elevated to the status of National Trail. It was first considered as one of the first wave of long-distance paths in the early 1950s, but took until 1996 to be officially completed. Passing as it does some of the most sumptuous real estate in England, there were plenty of ruffled feathers to be smoothed about the idea of having the hoi polloi walking past their boathouses and helipads. Not that such problems were anything new. In the 150 miles between Cricklade and Teddington Lock, the path crosses the river 28 times; a hangover from the days when wealthy landowners refused to allow the towpath through the end of their garden, forcing bargees and their