poliphilo

We're staying on a dairy farm between Garstang and Lancaster- with miniature goats in a paddock at the bottom of the garden path. The sea is only a few miles away and yesterday morning we went looking for it. The road ran parallel to the coast but we couldn't find any turnings that led to it, so we drove on and on until we ran out of land at the end of the Wyre peninsula in a place called Knot End- and there it was. Sort of. Because apart from the odd pool and the trickle in the estuary-there wasn't any water- just the seemingly limitless sands of Morecambe Bay.

Knot End is on the other side of the river from Fleetwood- a town which is largely the work of my old friend the neo-classical architect Decimus Burton who made such a success of St Leonards. See how elegant it is! The long barrack-like building is Queens Terrace and the sticky-up thing is one of his two lighthouses.