Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in Eastmere ·
The Salt Road from Eastmere
A track of white stones runs across the marsh from Eastmere to the sea, and the fishermen say you must walk it barefoot at low tide, carrying a pinch of salt, and never once look back at the village.
- status: folklore
Before the sea wall was built, the marsh between Eastmere and the coast was salt flats, and the only road across it was a line of white stones laid by hand in a long curve from the village to the old landing. The stones are still there. They run for nearly two miles through the reeds, each one the size of a loaf, pale and smooth and faintly crusted with salt where the spring tides reach them. The council signs them as a heritage path. The fishermen call them the Salt Road and they do not walk on it lightly.
The folklore is clear about how it must be walked. You go barefoot, at the lowest point of the spring tide, when the water has pulled back and the flats are firm. You carry a pinch of salt in your left fist, and you do not open the fist until you reach the landing. You do not speak on the road. And you must not look back at Eastmere, whatever you hear behind you, because the village has a way of calling its children home, and the road remembers each step that is taken toward it.
The older fishermen say this is why the village has so many people who never leave. A young man will walk the road to see the sea, come back halfway, and turn round to look at the lights of home, and find that the path ahead has grown longer and the village has come no nearer. He walks until the tide turns, and the salt road closes over him. The stones are still there in the morning, a little whiter than before.
There is a story about a girl named Hester Crane, who went out along the road one spring with a pinch of salt in her fist and her brother's coat over her shoulders. She was a sensible girl, the story says, and she did not look back, even when she heard her mother calling from the village and her father's boat horn sounding out over the marsh. She reached the landing with her fist still closed and the salt untouched. Then she opened her hand, and the salt was gone, and in its place was a single small stone, white as bone, which she put in her pocket. When she got home the village was empty. The houses were there, the boats were drawn up, the fires were laid. There was nobody in any of them, and nobody had been for a long time.
The council's archive has a note, dated 1912, that says a footpath survey was carried out on the Salt Road and that the surveyors found, at the landing end, a neat row of white stones leading back toward the village, each one set with a pinch of salt on its crown. The surveyor's notes say that the road was walked, that night, by a single figure walking slowly in the wrong direction, with the coat on its shoulders, and that it did not look back.
The fishermen tell this story to the children who go out with them, to make them careful. Walk the road properly. Do not look back. And if you find a white stone in your pocket when you get home, do not throw it away, because someone has already been waiting for it.