crepuscular sun rays breaking through storm clouds over morecambe bay in england
vertical photo of crepuscular sun rays breaking through storm clouds over morecambe bay in england UK with an exposed sand bank in the water and Heysham power station visible on the horizon. Morecambe Bay is a large bay in northwest England, nearly due east of the Isle of Man and just to the south of the Lake District National Park. It is the largest expanse of intertidal mudflats and sand in the United Kingdom, covering a total area of 310 square km. Towns on the bay include Barrow-in-Furness, Ulverston, Grange-Over-Sands, Morecambe, Fleetwood and Heysham. The rivers Leven, Kent, Keer, Lune and Wyre drain into the Bay, with their various estuaries creating a number of peninsulas within the bay, such as Humphry Head. Much of the land around the bay is reclaimed, forming saltmarshes used in agriculture. Morecambe Bay is also an important wildlife site, with abundant bird life and varied marine habitats, and there is a bird observatory at Walney Island. The bay is also notorious for its quicksand and fast moving tides (it is said that the tide can come in "as fast as a horse can run"). There have been royally appointed local guides (holding the post of Queen's Guide to the Sands) for crossing the bay for centuries. This difficulty of crossing the bay added to the isolation of the land to its north which, due to the presence of the mountains of the Lake District, could only be reached by crossing these sands or by ferry, until the Furness Railway was built in 1867. This skirts the edge of the bay, crossing the various estuaries. The West Coast Main Line also briefly runs alongside the bay - interestingly, the only place where the London-Glasgow railway actually runs alongside the coast. Morecambe Bay was featured on the television programme Seven Natural Wonders as one of the wonders of the North. The bay has rich cockle beds, which have been fished by locals for generations. On the night of 5 February 2004, at least 21 Chinese immigrant cockle pickers drowned af
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Photo credit: © Michael Sayles / Alamy / Afripics
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