A poignant reminder of Lancashire's involvement in the slave trade.

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I have my daughter and son in law visiting this week and we have been introducing my son in law to some of the interesting things in this area that there is not a lot known about. Today we took him to a poignant little place, very small and insignificant but interesting all the same. Firstly we drove along the road - which is rather like a causeway - it is just a single lane road across the salt marshes that, when the tide is high cuts of the village from the rest of the peninsular. This road takes you to Sunderland Point, a tiny village on the peninsula between the mouth of the River Lune and Morecambe Bay, in the Lancaster district of Lancashire; in the past this was used for the large boats and ships that brought goods into the Port of Lancaster. This place has been a popular place for my family to visit for years, we have more often walked to it from the Middleton Sands area on the coastline near to Heysham, and the reason we have always visited ids to go to Sambo's Grave. If it wasn't for the sign pointing to this passers by would not spot it, it looks very insignificant and yet it has a lot of social history involved and is a reminder of the awful Slave Trade in England at the time. Sambo's grave is in fact a grave and VERY simple memorial to a young, black slave who arrived in 1736 at the port with his master. He was born in Africa and taken first to the West Indies as a slave before being brought to Lancaster by his master. At Sunderland Point though the boy was taken ill and died and was buried in an unmarked grave on the side of the shore. In 1795 the local schoolteacher - Rev Watson - raised enough money to build a memorial to Sambo and wrote an elegy for on the grave. The epitaph reads: [i]Full sixty years the angry winter's wave Has thundering dashed this bleak and barren shore Since Sambo's head laid in this lonely grave Lies still and ne'er will hear their turmoil more. Full many a sandbird chirps upon the sod, And many a moonlight elfin round him trips Full many a summer's sunbeam warms the clod And many a teeming cloud upon him drips. But still he sleeps - till the awakening sounds, Of the Archangel's trump new life impart, Then the Great Judge his approbation founds, Not on man's colour but his worth of heart. [/i] Now that grave is just a stone slab with the epitaph on and a simple wooden cross - for as many years as I can remember the local children have collected stones from the beach and painted them and left messages for Sambo, and also decorated the grave with flowers and little toys. My daughter (now 21) was quite disappointed she couldn't fine the one she left around 15 years ago!!! This is a lovely little place to visit and certainly makes you think about that time in British history when we enslaved those poor people!!