April 1983. We risked the tidal road over the salt marsh to Sunderland Point. It is a long disused port in Lancashire, at the mouth of the River Lune.
The dockside with its row of mooring posts stands forlornly next to the gravel bed of the edge of the river. Hard to imagine now as a thriving busy port thronged with ocean going ships unloading goods for transport to the mills of Manchester and the rest of Lancashire.
Sunderland Point was where the first cargoes of cotton came to, from America. In 1983 it had two curiosities that reminded us of those times. The "Cotton" Tree, seen above, is actually a kapok - a type of poplar - but it gained its name because it started to grow soon after the first bales of cotton were imported here and the locals thought it had grown from a seed blown from the bales. They didn't know that cotton grows on a bush rather than a tree.
Sadly, a few years after this photo was taken, the tree was damaged in a storm and died, having to be uprooted.
The second curiosity is Sambo's Grave, the grave of a negro slave left here c1736 by his master whilst he went inland on business. The legend is that the negro thought himself abandoned in this wild place amongst strangers and died of a broken heart. Another version is that he died after catching a disease from the locals that he had no immunity to. However he died, the locals refused to bury a non-Christian in the churchyard and the sailors buried him on the headland according to the Lonsdale Magazine of 1822: "...without either coffin or bier, being covered only with the clothes in which he died."
The entire place is a bit of a curiosity. It was Lancaster's first port, but the tidal nature of the road to it meant that goods could only be transported at low tide to and from the port. It was replaced by Glasson Dock in 1787 on the other side of the River Lune.
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