Beware the Poo!
If there’s one local place name that sends a shudder down the spine it must be “Quicksand Pool”.
We’ve all heard the chilling stories of deaths on the sands of Morecambe Bay — the hidden channels, the racing tide and the treacherous quicksands that trap and pull down the unwary traveller.
The first time I went looking for it on the shore below Warton Crag at Quaker’s Stang, I assumed that Quicksand Pool must be some kind of depression in the sands: a pool replenished by each returning tide. In fact Quicksand Pool is the stream that drains Leighton Moss – an extension of the channel that runs through the RSPB reserve and on to the foreshore near Jenny Brown’s Point.
So if it’s a stream, why do we call it a pool?
This is the fun bit and John Lucas (1684-1750) offers an explanation. He writes the name not as “Pool” but “Poo”.
“Quick-Sand-Poo…is a small Rivulet coming out of the Mosses,” he says on p83 of the new edition of ‘A History of Warton Parish’. And later: “There are several little Poos, as they call them or Rivulets where Quicksands are much more frequent than near the greater Rivers”.
So ‘Poo’ – according to Lucas – is a local word meaning a stream or small river. Could it be that some strait-laced (po-faced?) Victorian decided to add an ‘l’ to the ‘Poo’ in the interests of propriety?
I do hope Lucas is right on this. I would be happier if we could find other examples of local ‘Poos’ to support his claim. I’d be grateful for any advice readers can offer. A quick internet search discovers several small rivers with the name ‘Pool’…but no ‘Poo’ so far. *
Set against Lucas is a piece of inconvenient, mid-thirteenth century written evidence. It’s a document drawn up for Warton’s Lord of the Manor, Walter de Lindsay clearly referring to ‘Quytsandpole’ – which seems to be closer to ‘pool’ than ‘poo’.
In any case, whether Pools or Poos, these areas are tragically perilous, as Lucas reminds us: “Especially Quicksand Poo, where in my Remembrance, three Men (one of them a Relation of mine, who was supposed to understand the Sands very well) and their Horses were suffocated at once, and a fourth escaped very narrowly.”
* Interestingly, most of the ‘Pools’ I’m aware of so far are relatively local — Rusland Pool, which rises in Grizedale Forest, Kirkby Pool, which is part of the Duddon catchment, and the River Pool which runs past Underbarrow. Further south, Freckleton Pool is a tributary of the Ribble and then there are Crossens Pool and the Three Pools Waterway in Sefton.
A lonely southern outlier is a second River Pool which runs through Sydenham in South London. It enjoyed a brief moment of fame in 2009 when the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, fell in – much to the delight of watching journalists. Imagine their further joy had they been able to say that Boris had fallen into the Poo!