Martin Mere

Martin Mere was one of the largest lakes in England — a broad, shallow expanse of water in the flat moss-lands north of Ormskirk in Lancashire, fed by the rivers Martin and Douglas. For centuries it was a feature of the landscape that shaped settlement patterns, drove wildfowling and fishing economies, and accumulated its own mythology.

The Arthurian tradition attached to it is local and persistent: Martin Mere is the water to which the dying Arthur commanded Sir Bedivere to cast Excalibur, and into which the hand and arm rose to receive the sword. The identification is not found in Malory or the major Arthurian texts, but in the folklore of the Lancashire district — a regional claim to the ending of the great story.

The Fleetwood-Hesketh family drained the mere in the eighteenth century, converting it to agricultural land. Much of that land has since been restored to wetland as a Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve, where wild geese and whooper swans now winter on water that once lay over a drowned Arthurian legend. Whether the sword went with the water, and whether the hand is still there somewhere in the dark peaty ground, Lancashire tradition declines to settle.