24 July, 2005

Cycle ride: Lancaster-Sambo's Grave-Morecambe-Lancaster

I've frequently been to Sunderland (the tiny village at the mouth of the River Lune near Lancaster, not the large city near Newcastle-upon-Tyne), but hadn't found its most notable landmark, Sambo's Grave. *

As the name suggests, this is the grave of an 18th Century slave put ashore from a ship heading to Lancaster, who died either of disease or a broken heart, depending on one's favoured story. The burial site is some distance from the settlement, in the corner of a field on the other side of the headland.

After the short walk to the grave and a few photos, I cycled back across the saltmarsh to 'the mainland' at Overton, on to Morecambe via Heysham, then home to Lancaster.

Incidentally, the grave is definitely near Sunderland Point, within a few miles of Lancaster, not on the Wirral, the peninsula between Liverpool and Wales. At least two people have already visited this entry via a seach for "sambo slave buried wirral" or similar, but that's incorrect.

* In performing web searches for 'Sambo's Grave', you may find that one person has posted comments to a number of sites, suggesting that 'Samboo's Grave' is the correct name. That's possible, but there is no evidence to support this one person's assertion, which contradicts decades, even centuries, of actual usage, and one can easily propose a counter-argument. Widespread repetition doesn't prove anything!