The front doors have flood boards leaning beside them, ready to slot into place. This is the first thing you notice about the two low terraces at Sunderland Point: Georgian and late-17th-century houses facing the water, each one prepared to be flooded. Heysham nuclear power station sits on the shoreline to the north. The two rows are called, without ceremony, First Terrace and Second Terrace.
To reach any of it you drive a single-track road across open tidal marsh, and the road goes under water at every high tide. When the tide runs above about eight metres it is impassable, so you check a tide table before you leave and again before you come back. There is no official car park. You leave the car on the shingle near the public toilets, where it is also at some risk of tidal submersion, or you park at Potts Corner and walk in along the West Shore. Sunderland Point is the only mainland community in the country entirely dependent on the tide letting it in.
Which means the practical advice is short. There are no pubs, no shops and no cafés here, so you bring a picnic. The nearest of everything is Overton, a mile and a half away across the causeway, which has two pubs and St Helen's Church, one of the oldest in Lancashire, with a Norman south doorway carved with beakhead and chevron. The Ship Hotel in Overton does belly pork with crackling and a chicken Parmo, at prices reviewers call very reasonable and in portions they call very generous. There is an open fire and leather armchairs and an art gallery on site.
The walking is the reason to be here. The Sunderland Point circular runs five and a half miles from Overton across the causeway, along the shore and back by field paths, taking in salt marsh, mud flats and shingle. The whole peninsula is a Site of Special Scientific Interest with, as it is put, a remarkable display of birdlife; dogs stay leashed and drones are banned over the marsh. Great British Life called it an "edge-of-the-known-world seascape."
The village was built to be busy. A Quaker named Robert Lawson raised it around 1700 as an outport for Lancaster, handling cotton, sugar and slaves, with a custom house, an anchor smithy and a ropewalk, some of it built from stone robbed off the ruined Cockersand Abbey across the river. Lawson went bankrupt in 1728. When Glasson Dock opened in 1787 the trade left, and Sunderland reinvented itself as a place to take the sea air.
The gated path along the shore leads to Sambo's grave, the resting place of a Black cabin boy who arrived around 1736, believed himself abandoned when his master went to Lancaster, and died in a brewhouse loft. He was buried in unconsecrated ground on the open shore. The grave almost always bears flowers, wooden crosses or pebbles painted by local children, and new ones keep arriving.
