Morecambe Bay

Late in the evening ten years ago on the 5th February, we were woken by the sound of helicopters flying low overhead. We didn't know it then, but there was a tragedy unfolding out in Morecambe Bay. A large group of illegal cockle pickers were caught far out in the Bay by the rapid incoming tide. 23 Chinese people, economic migrants with poor English, died that night after being taken out into the Bay in witheringly cold conditions, inadequately dressed and led by a gang master who didn't know how to read a tide table. It is said that locals who had been working out there too had tried to warn them, but were unable to make themselves understood.

The Bay is a beautiful place, a vast wet wilderness populated by huge flocks of waders and wildfowl. The pattern of creeks and mudbanks is dynamic and ever changing, the play of light on the saturated mud and water draws me back again and again, it is different every time. Today Gus and Wifie walked a little way out onto the mud, giving scale to this huge mud and waterscape. In the distance on the left the power station at Heysham is just discernible, on the right, the limestone finger of Humphrey Head points into the Bay.

When the fishery is open, the local pickers work safely miles off shore, a cold and backbreaking job hand raking the cockles. It's not an easy way to make a living. Ten years ago, a bountiful crop of cockles, together with the closure of several big shell fisheries elsewhere in England and Wales, meant there were big profits to be made. This drew in the greedy gang masters, paying their workers a pittance and carrying off lorry loads of shellfish to sell to Spain and elsewhere in Europe. After the tragedy, a new law was passed to prevent workers from being exploited illegally by gang masters and there have been a number of prosecutions under the Act. We hope a tragedy of that scale could never happen again, though every year there are many rescues of the unwary caught by the rising tide or stuck in mud.