ii. Here’s where you stop to watch the setting sun – a sheet of light laid over the bay, a streak of pink and lilac in the west and then the softening of the sky, the hills becoming greyer, blurring into cloud, the water growing colourless. Then the wink of the lighthouse at Walney, a sprinkling of streetlights, clusters of houses, Barrow and Grange floating on air, and out on the flat plain of the Fylde, the long reach of Fleetwood, the stretch of the prom. Turn your back on all this, and the road’s a pale line between dark fields and moors. Light in a window, the lamp of a bike being pedalled uphill. Dusk quietens everything. And on that seventh-century day when they had buried a boat-shaped coffin here, did the mourners keep vigil by a fire they’d lit as night began to fall, and whisper blessings for the dead? Elizabeth Burns iii. iv. |