The Blue Anchor has stood on the main street since 1706, which makes it the oldest pub in the village and older than the canal it sits beside. It's a plain village local, homely rather than glamorous, with a large beer garden that turns into a sun trap in summer, music and quizzes, dogs allowed, and a kitchen best known for its pizzas. Food runs Monday to Saturday until eight.
Up on the A6, the Royal Hotel has been there since 1904 and takes a different line. It's a gastropub with seven en-suite letting rooms, where the head chef, Rob, changes the menu every month and buys from local butchers, greengrocers and fishmongers. The courtyard garden backs directly onto the Lancaster Canal, and there's a car park opposite, free while you're using the pub.
There used to be a third. The Packet Boat, a canal-side inn established around 1820 and named for the passenger boats that once ran the Lancaster Canal, closed in 2015 and is now housing. It's Grade II listed, so the building survives even though the pub doesn't.
For food away from the pubs, Red Bank Farm sits out on the shore of Morecambe Bay: a working organic farm with a campsite, a pets corner, and Archers Cafe in a converted lambing shed. The kitchen does homemade soups, lamb burgers from the farm's own salt-marsh flock, and Morecambe Bay potted shrimps, and you can watch the milking or feed a calf while you wait. The view runs west across the bay to the Lakeland hills, and the sunsets here are the ones people mention.
Everyday shops and a library cover the basics; the nearest supermarkets and banks are in Carnforth.
Two corridors define the place. The Lancaster Canal towpath runs flat and traffic-free through the village, part of the Kendal-to-Lancaster Towpath Trail. The other is the bay: endless flat sand at low tide, fast tides and quicksand the rest of the time. The Sea View Loop, a little over four miles, stitches the two together along the canal and the Lancashire Coastal Way. Stick to firm sand near the shore and read the warning signs.
The village was once called Cockletown, cockling on the bay being common enough to define it; in 1867 the vicar complained that children gathering cockles were "missing out on their education entirely." The bay is still dangerous. In February 2004, twenty-three Chinese cockle pickers drowned near Red Bank Farm, and a limestone sculpture called the Praying Shell now stands nearby in their memory.
Holy Trinity Church has had something on its site since before 1094. The tower is late fifteenth century, and inside are two carved Anglo-Saxon stones from the tenth century and a 1642 memorial to a man who, the inscription says, was supposed to have lived above a hundred years. The Domesday surveyors recorded the manor as Bodeltone, held by Earl Tostig.
The village lost its own railway station in 1969. The nearest now is Carnforth, a couple of miles up the line and the platform where Brief Encounter was filmed. The Stagecoach 555 runs through on the A6 from Lancaster towards Keswick.
The two public tennis courts are free to use whenever the club isn't playing on them, which for a village this size is a fairly generous arrangement.
