High tide at Morecombe Bay

Today we braved the weather and took a favourite walk around Leighton Moss. The walk starts from the Eric Morecombe hide car park and goes over the hillside which you can see in front of you from Lillian's hide, drops down to Leighton Hall and enters Leighton Moss at the far end of the Public Causeway. Normally, following lunch in the café, we continue the walk through Silverdale to Jack Scout and Jenny Brown's Point and then back to the car via the saltmarsh footpath. However today, with the weather turning nastier by the minute, and with a 10.3m tide approaching and a sign on the car park warning that it might flood today, it seemed more appropriate to cut short the walk and rescue the car.

The fields near the car park and adjacent to the railway line often hold geese, and today in amongst the greylags there were five European whitefronts. A bit distant but they stood out nicely.

The bad news about cutting the walk short was that we would miss out the saltmarsh at high tide, so we took a slight detour before returning to the car and went for a look. The tide was right up to the footpath, I've never seen it so high here, and we clearly couldn't have done our usual walk because parts of it were under water. Look at the house and the chimney in the photos below, we normally walk right past them!

Eric Morecombe hide.

Finally we got back to the car, and not a moment too soon. There were two RSPB staff guarding the closed gate to the car park and mine was the last car. I don't know if the car park did flood, but it was a close call.