Lost But Still Visible

How it used to be - apart from the railings.

In Southport over the weekend for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, a lovely day of champagne and cake and family.  We stayed on the waterfront overlooking the Marine Lake, so we had a landscape in front of us that was layered; sky, sea, beach, tree-covered islands, open water, promenade.  And it occurred to me that this was how this landscape - this waterscape - used to look before it was drained from the 1690s onwards.

The west Lancashire coast used to be a narrow strip of small vulnerable towns on a sandbank/series of high dunes.  I would have loved to see 'inland', a strange dark place called the Moss;  fens, marsh, small island-villages and lagoons of open water. St Cuthbert's body was hidden here from the raiding Norsemen, a furtive torchlit journey by night from island village to island village.  A fragile place; a strong high tide could send water surging ten or fifteen miles 'inland', and in the ugly 1970s suburb of Marshside I could still see the 'cops', a local word for earthen sea defences.  (Got me interested now - I will try and find some of my Mosswalking notes and upload them.)   

And I could see a version of this waterscape from the apartment window.  I once managed to photograph a room that was no longer there, a corner forgotten beneath a bathroom; I will try and find this as well!  The past is all around us and occasionally visible.