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Morecambe Bay

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Geography of Great
Britain

   Morecambe Bay at low tide from Hest Bank, looking towards
   Grange-over-Sands.
   Enlarge
   Morecambe Bay at low tide from Hest Bank, looking towards
   Grange-over-Sands.

   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 km². 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.

Bridge Discussion

   Discussions as to whether to build a road bridge over the bay have been
   ongoing for decades, particularly in the more isolated north of the
   bay. The most recent suggestion was of a "green bridge", flanked by
   wind turbines and using tidal power to mitigate the environmental
   damage of its construction . The bridge would be twelve miles long and
   stretch from Heysham to Barrow-in-Furness, at the bay's mouth.
   Feasibility studies are ongoing, though over two years since this
   version of the bridge was proposed, little progress has been made. In
   the 2005 UK General Election, Timothey Bell polled just 1.1% of the
   votes in the Barrow and Furness constituency for the Build Duddon and
   Morecambe Bay Bridges Party.

   In 1974 gas was discovered offshore, and development of the Morecambe
   Bay gas field began several years later. A lease has been granted for
   the development of two wind turbine sites in the bay, one at Walney
   Island and the other at Cleveleys. Together these will have around 50
   turbines.

2004 Morecambe Bay Cockling Disaster

   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 after being cut off by the tides. This
   tragedy led some commentators to suggest that the cockle beds should be
   closed until improved safety measures could be introduced.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morecambe_Bay"
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   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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