At the shore there's a sign telling you not to walk out onto the sands. Not without the official guide, anyway. Hest Bank is the traditional Lancashire start of the guided walk across Morecambe Bay to Kents Bank, six to eight miles over tidal sand, and the public byway still leaves the shore here even though the guided route now sets off from Arnside for safety. The sign is not decorative.
The rest of the village sits behind the salt-flats, running up to Slyne on higher ground, with the Lancaster Canal threading through on an embankment above the beach. The foreshore is open sand, with wide views across the bay to the Lake District fells.
The Hest Bank sits right on the canal bank, one of the oldest pubs in the area. It was first licensed in 1544 to brew mead, ale, sack and honey beer and sell cooked game, and for centuries afterwards it was the staging post for the coach crossings over the sands. The menu now runs to tomato and mozzarella bruschetta, grilled seabass risotto, a peri-peri chicken burger with lemon and herb mayo, house pies and fish and chips, with sticky toffee pudding or Cherry Bakewell cheesecake after. There's a rear garden.
Its history is more eventful than most pubs manage. By 1812 the stables had been extended to hold sixteen horses, four drivers and a rescue team for the crossing, and a lantern room was built to guide travellers over the sands. In 1792 the innkeeper shot and wounded the highwayman Edmund Grosse, who was hanged at Lancaster Castle and then tarred and gibbeted at Hanging Green Lane for over two years.
There are two cafés for something less involved. Bay Crossing Cafe is on Coastal Road; the Shore Café is reached from canal bridge 118, down Station Road and across the railway line, and looks straight out over the bay towards the Lake District.
For walking, a six-mile circular starts from the car park at Pasture Lane, past Happy Mount Park and Morecambe Golf Club. The canal towpath is level walking through fields, with barges and a view back to Torrisholme Barrow on the Morecambe skyline. The beach itself is a sandy stretch backed by grass, good for birdwatching — the RSPB manages the saltmarsh and mudflats north towards Silverdale, and Leighton Moss, the largest reed bed in north-west England, is a short drive on.
Hest Bank had its own station once, opened in 1846. By 1890 the station master was reporting up to 800 people arriving a day, and the place was described in a gazetteer as "a small watering place." It closed to passengers in 1969; Lancaster, three miles south, is now the nearest, with buses running through the village on the coastal road.
The port went the same way. A jetty built in 1820, reaching about 250 metres offshore, landed coasting vessels from Liverpool and Glasgow, but the trade was gone within a few decades and the jetty was buried by shifting sand, only re-emerging in 2004.
The crossings kept going long after everything else stopped. Cedric Robinson, the Queen's Guide to the Sands, led walkers over the bay for 56 years, from 1963 until 2019 — born into a Flookburgh cockling family, and raising over a million pounds for charity.
