The geography of the district surrounding Lancaster is by no means simple. It is a country bordering upon the sea, which here and there advances into the land, in the shapes of great sandy bays and long, tongue-like estuaries of short but turbulent rivers that, taking their origin as mountain-torrents amid the gloomy heights of the eternal hills and mountains of Lakeland, have their sudden moods, dictated by the melting of the snows, and by rain-storms. The distant landscape in the neighbourhood of Lancaster is always closed in by mountain heights, and the flat shores of Morecambe Bay look the more flat, and the far-off fells appear the more rugged, in these several contrasts. A considerable number of these little rivers come pouring down from the Lakes to the sea: the Lune, the Kent, the Keer, the Winster, the Leven, the Crake, and the Duddon. The road on to Kendal and Carlisle avoids all the estuaries, and goes uneventfully onwards; but travellers who wished to pass expeditiously between Lancaster, Furness, and Ulverston had no choice but to make their perilous way “Over Sands,” across the inner bight of Morecambe Bay, at low tide. The alternative was the unwelcome, and anciently the dangerous, one of going the extravagantly long way round by Milnthorpe, Crosthwaite, and Newby Bridge, under Whitbarrow, where the treacherous Mosses, almost as dangerous as the sands of the seashore, spread, and where the lawless and desperate cattle-reivers lurked. Confronted with these problems, old-time wayfarers generally chose the sands. [Sidenote: “_OVER-SANDS_”] The story of “Lancaster Sands,” as they are often called, is romantic and melancholy. The hazardous crossing was made between Hest Bank and Kent’s Bank, a distance of eleven miles, over a wet sandy waste that is twelve feet deep in sea-water, at high tide. In these days of railway travel, and since 1864, when the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway was opened, the Over-Sands route is less frequently used, and principally by farmers’ carts and by inquisitive tourists; but in all the earlier centuries it was necessary, and great pains were taken to ensure, so far as might humanly be, the safety of travellers across. The sands are first mentioned by Tacitus, in his history of the second campaign waged by Agricola against the Western Brigantes, the tribes inhabiting Furness and the northern detached district of Lancashire now known as North Lonsdale. The Romans, with their usual combined thoroughness and prudence, appear to have made causeways crossing the estuaries of the Kent, the Leven, and the Duddon, considerably inshore from the exposed Over-Sands route and somewhat on the route of the present railway bridges; but traces of their handiwork are now very few.