A lifetime of Islands: December 2018

Old Law is an uninhabited tidal island located to the north of Ross Back Sands on the east coast of Northumberland. It is separated from Ross Back dunes by a gap of about 300 metres on the sea side at Ross Point but only about 50 metres on the landward western side.  The landward side is a salt marsh, while the seaward side of the gap is sandy. The gap is called Wide Open, which is an appropriate name for a gap! The island itself is really just a very large sand dune, which is now covered in marram and other grasses. The island is just under a mile long by about 400 metres wide at its widest points.

It seems that Old Law only became an island at some point between 1769 (Armstrong's map) and 1820 (Fryer's map).

Ross Back Sands are only accessible on foot. There is an informal parking area for a dozen or so cars at the end of the public road at Ross (grid reference). There are no road signs to the beach. When I arrived at about 8.45 on a weekday morning there were only a couple of cars there but by the time I left 2 hours later the parking area was full. It is a flat walk of just over a mile from the parking area north east along the only public footpath, which first passes some holiday cottages, then crosses a field (full of placid cows when I visited) before entering an area of rough grazing, which soon becomes sand dunes. Once you get to the beach, you then have to turn north west and walk up the beach for 2km in order to reach the crossing point to Old Law. The day I visited was a particularly low tide and I don't know how long the island is cut off for on an average tide. It was a bit of a trudge along the beach, as the sand is a bit soft in places.

A 25" to a mile scale Ordnance Survey map from 1898 shows a lifeboat house and well located in the middle of the island but towards the southern end.  These were marked as disused on a 1922 map and they are not shown at all on modern OS maps.

There are two prominent tall navigation beacons at Guile Point on the northern end of Old Law, one on the foreshore and one in the dunes.   They look a bit like industrial chimneys. I only explored the southern tip of the island, although I had seen the daymarks from Holy Island a couple of days previously.