Spoots

A spring morning in pursuit of shellfish along the Solway coast - cooked on a driftwood fire and then home in time to start the day.

We walked across the empty bay at dawn, stepping over the crab holes and the lonely lumps of lowlit jellyfish. People say it’s dangerous when the tide’s gone out - and to be sure, there are quicksands and deadly trapping creeks - but once you’re on the mud itself, it’s easy-going stuff; you simply keep the hills to your back and head south towards England and the sea. On this morning, the tide drained and gurgled round our ankles at the otter-hour, and the last stars were reflected in the rippled pools of mud and briny water. We talked aloud and ran in shifts like children - then after an hour’s constant movement, we slowed and dropped our voices. We’d come to a good spot.

The signs were hard to see at first, and sometimes when the tide has fallen more steeply off into deeper holes, this work is altogether easier because there are juts of shells and pointing ends to seek for in the mud. But there were no such hints on this cool morning in late April. We only had the sudden spurt of seawater to watch for - because as razor clams detect your movements nearby, they jerk suddenly down into the mud and conceal themselves. This lurching movement produces a small spurt of salt water – and a hole which is very quickly backfilled by brine and sediment. That’s why we call these creatures “spoots” – the spout of water is like the bullseye of a hidden target, revealed for a moment in a squirt of salted lightness.

The clams burrow deeply, but in the moment of their “spooting”, there’s a chance to hurry forward and pour salt into the hole they’ve left behind them; salt from the kitchen table, usually poured from a plastic container or a jamjar, and nothing more spectacular than that. If you’ve found them in time, the results are almost immediate.

For reasons known only to themselves, spoots are disgusted by a surfeit of salt. They seem to choke on it, and it brings them into a surge of belching and flatulence. You can tell when the trick has worked because the mud begins to heave and swell like a sickness; the spoots dig down and up at once, panicked by the salt assault - then if you’re lucky, they’ll jump diagonally out of the mud like damaged submarines.

The old man who showed me how to play this trick thirty years ago had no specific interest in watching the spoots come up. He would walk across a bed of likely spots and pour salt into their holes without ever looking back. At the end of a hundred-yard sweep, he’d turn and walk back on his tracks, picking up the clams as if they were so much litter – because once flushed from the mud, they seem unable to climb back into safety again. Perhaps they would if given enough time, but if you don’t pick them up and take them away, the seagulls surely will.

The sun burst across the Pennines. In twenty golden minutes, we’d pulled sixteen of these cigar-sized spoots from their fortress in the low tide. And all the while, the sea’s reek was weighed against the scent which rose from banks of bluebells on the shore nearby; the sound of oystercatchers, a cuckoo and the furious, petulant bellow of a roebuck. We took the first decent haul of the year – wrapped in a sock – and we carried them to the rocks nearby. Then in a fire made of driftwood, we baked them open and slurped them down, with the sweet and freshened flavour of scallops.

By seven o’clock in the morning, the fire had chewed its way through the wood and reduced our discarded shells into a mess of flakes like fingernails. And by the time we left and went home to work, the remains were nothing more than might have been left by our ancestors who fished and ate like this after the last Ice Age.

First published Bog Myrtle and Peat - May 2025