SHIFTING SANDS, RESTLESS TIDES: GRUNE POINT AND SKINBURNESS MARSH

At Grune Point there are no edges, only margins, a liminal space where earth, sky and water constantly shift and reform, uncertain sometimes which is which. This narrow spit of land extending for a mile east of the village of Skinburness was formed through the accumulation and deposition of sand and gravel by the waves of the Solway Firth. It holds a few green fields fringed by a narrow wilderness of gorse and scrub and ever-restless shingle banks. Protectively it shelters the inshore waters of Moricambe Bay from the storms of the open sea, allowing the formation of extensive saltmarsh and mudflats, a haven for wading birds and over-wintering wildfowl. Within the sand dunes are rare plants, dense mats of succulent sea sandwort, the strikingly silvered sea holly and acres of sand couch-grass forming the pale frothing winter margins. It is also home to a colony of natterjack toads, one of Britain’s rarest amphibians.

To the south, on Skinburness Marsh, the sky occupies three quarters of every view, changing from moment to moment with trailing cloud shadows, its distant margins washed-out and indistinguishable. Yet viewed from above it appears as a vast organism fed by the veins and capillaries of creeks and dubs. The marsh keeps growing through gradual accretions, its frilled edges busy with marsh samphire trapping sediment, dissipating the energy of the waves and inch by inch making fence lines redundant.

Here birds are everywhere absorbed in their own worlds. Dunlin and grey plover rest on the margins, redshanks forage the incoming tide, dowks explode from the trees behind the row of early 19th century cottages which gaze out onto the marsh.  A heron lands jerkily on the sea dyke, neatly folding away its wings before subsiding into utter immobility and as the light fades, long skeins of geese return, their wing beat audible through the northern winter’s nightfall. It was from a wooden hut on this marsh a hundred years ago, that William Nicholl produced a series of ‘Birdnotes’. A great expert on the wildfowl of the marsh, for him there was no pleasure equal to lying in his punt on a moonlit night floating with the tides along the creeks and listening to the ebb and flow of life around him.

In contrast to all this is the modern village of Skinburness, a straggling, disengaged suburbia of bungalows cowed against the prevailing south-westerlies. In the late 18th century the village had enjoyed a brief renaissance as a summer bathing resort for ‘genteel families’ and until recently was dominated by the Skinburness Hotel, a Victorian building large enough to incorporate all styles of architecture without constraint, as well as boasting from its outset, ‘hot water throughout’. However, its main purpose appears to have been to bankrupt each successive owner, until it inevitably fell derelict and was demolished in 2017. Now a forest of buddleia flourishes unencumbered across the site with patches of tessellated flooring still stubbornly adhering to the ground. It is a rather sad sight, until you see the summer butterflies.

The name Skinburness is thought to be a corruption of the Old English ‘scinnan burg’ meaning ‘the headland of the demon haunted stronghold’. It sounds fanciful and I fear it may be. The earliest references to the settlement and port date from the mid 12th century when land was granted to the Cistercians for the foundation of a monastery at Holm Cultram. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, it had developed into a settlement of some consequence becoming a temporary naval base for Edward I’s fleet during his campaigns in Scotland. This confidence culminated in the granting of a charter for a market and fair and prosperity seemed assured. However, it’s fortunes like Edward’s were short-lived, and sometime between August 1301 and April 1304 a series of storms flooded and eroded the headland, destroying most of the settlement. As a near contemporary document relates, ‘there remained nothing but sandy waste’.

Also built within this short-lived moment of optimism was the Chapel of St John, situated on the south side of the Grune overlooking the marsh. Within a couple of years of the destruction of the village, it was redundant. Nothing now remains to be seen, yet the ruins of this building must of have remained a landmark for centuries. In the list of the watches on the West Marches made by Lord Wharton in 1553, it is recorded that ’Skinburneyes and Pellathow to keep watch from the Estcote to St John's of the Green (Grune)’. Joseph Nicholson viewing the sea banks at Skinburness in 1704, mentions ‘the ruins of St John's Chapel yet to be seen in the Grune or Groine, a little to the east from the town’.

Forty years later the Gentleman’s Magazine reports, ‘The Grune is a remarkable head of land, whose position the common maps have widely mistaken. It is now only a rabbit warren, and hardly any vestige left where an ancient chapel stood, … the whole is a low beachy coast.’ Certainly it was correct in doubting early sources, since the mistakes made on Saxton’s 1579 maps continued to be replicated until Thomas Donald’s 1774 map of the County of Cumberland which accurately locates Skinburness, the Sea Dyke snaking away to the south and the ‘Chapel of the Grune’.

Attempts to establish the exact location of the chapel in the 19th century were abandoned due to the number of burials encountered. Clearly the graveyard had continued in use long after the chapel had been abandoned to the elements.

In a classic case of ‘shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted’, the first sea dyke was built shortly after the destruction of Skinburness, extending south-eastwards between the site of the village and the present Sea Dyke End Farm. Although there is a reference to an existing sea dyke in 1570, the present earthwork appears to be largely post-medieval. Only at its northern end are there indications of an earlier, possibly medieval, phase with a clear stratigraphic development and the remains of a timber framework.

From at least the 16th to the 19th century maintenance of the sea dyke was administered by a curious body known as the ‘Sixteen Men of Holm Cultram’, who became recognised as the ‘Parliament’ in the manor of Holm Cultram. Their responsibilities included transporting oak trees, used to reinforce the sea dyke, from Wedholme Wood. As the only significant source of timber in the area, this woodland had been handed over to the ‘Sixteen Men’ by Elizabeth I, on condition that it was used solely to repair the sea dyke.

On various occasions down the centuries the dyke suffered serious damage from flooding, most significantly in February 1768 when a witness recalled ‘the greatest inundation of fresh water that ever was known at Skinbernees in the memory of man … they were obliged to cut the Seadike at three different places so that it run with great violence for four days…’.

A connection between the ‘Chapel of the Grune’ and the Arthurian tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, has been suggested by a number of writers including no less than J. R. R. Tolkien. Sadly however this seems to have originated in a 16th century printer’s error. More prosaically, ‘Grune’ is unlikely to have been a corruption of ‘green’ but rather ‘groyne’, signifying a sea-defence. Romanticism did not end here, unsurprisingly in a place so haunted by wind and weather. The former inn known as Long House, on the beach at Skinburness, was immortalised by Sir Walter Scott in ‘Red Gauntlet’ as the venue for a meeting between Charles Edward Stuart the ‘Young Pretender’, who had stealthily landed on the Solway shore, and his Jacobite supporters. It has also long been claimed as an infamous ‘clearing house’ for the proceeds of smuggling. To my mind equally romantic, is the sad sight of the once handsome, now burnt-out shell of Marsh House, which with the addition of wraith-like mist and trailing ivy, really ought be the setting for a gothic novel.

The most distinctive and possibly unique structure on the Grune, resembling something between a fossilized igloo and a mediaeval crypt, is a wartime pill-box. Constructed from concrete-filled sandbags, it is known, somewhat long-windedly, as the ‘Cumberland Machine-Gun and Anti-Tank Rifle Emplacement’. Above it is a memorial cairn to four firemen from Silloth who died on December 10, 1956. They had gone out into the Firth in an open boat after reports that a wildfowler was in trouble on the Skinburness Marshes. Their boat was presumed swamped by the rough seas. Their bodies were interred side by side in Silloth’s Causewayhead Cemetery.

Memories of storm, destruction and reformation are everywhere part of this landscape but there are also golden days, when the hedges of the few green fields of the Grune rattle with birds. The summer visitors, linnets, stonechats and whitethroats settle to nest and the scent of the gorse bleeds into the wind. On the marsh the dull stint of winter is coloured by innumerable spring flowers and the days seem immeasurably long. If there is one constant in this landscape it is change, a restlessness driven not only by the season but the twice daily tide. With the wind at its back and a frill of foam on its surface, the Solway tide is menacing in its roaring certainty, its power to destroy and create in equal measure. The patterns in the landscape, from the coastal fringe and marshlands to the narrow tracts of sand and mud, and the watercourses which run out in to the estuary, continue to evolve, sometimes stealthily, sometimes violently, and all life here, in all its forms, has its part to play within this daily transformation.

 First published in ‘Cumbria and Lakeland Walker’ magazine March 2024.