In 1815, Richard Ayton and William Daniell published "A Voyage Round Great Britain", an account of a remarkable journey they had made along the whole mainland coast [modern reprint available at Whitehaven Record Office and elsewhere]. They had visited Cumberland in 1813, and this extract starts at the point where the travellers leave Bootle:

"A traveller careful to be here at low water of a spring tide might proceed to a small bay directly west of the town, called Selker Bay, where, at the distance of about a mile from the shore, he might see, as the natives protest they have often seen, some fragments of black wood, which a very venerable tradition declares to be the remains of several gallies sunk there on some great invasion of this island by the Romans. The fact is thought to be countenanced in some degree by the appearance of some Roman works on the neighbouring coast. On the common of Esk Meals, it is said, there are the traces of an encampment, about which various coins and broken altars, with scraps of inscriptions, have been found...
From the appearance of the shore about Selker Bay, the sea seems to have gained considerably upon the land of late years, so much so indeed that it may be questioned whether there was water for the Roman gallies, at the time of the invasion, on the spot where the remains of them are said now to be seen. The bay is bounded all round by a low bank of earth, crammed full of smooth and rounded pebbles, evidently a deposit of the sea, which now, completing one more in a series of revolutions, is marching on to recover its former dominion. To the northward of this bay commence the Esk Meals, a desolate tract of sand-hills, where we had not the good fortune to stumble upon the Roman encampment. Deliberately to search for such a thing amidst this sea of hillocks, never occurred to our thoughts as a matter either of duty or amusement. There was nothing of natural scenery on the coast to gratify attention, but when we had advanced a mile or two to the northward of Bootle, the mountains burst upon our view in the east, in a more grand, various, and multiplied range than we had hitherto seen, at the distance of three, five, and fifteen miles from the sea. In the distance to the north appeared the great promontory of St. Bees, and to the west the Isle of Man rose majestically from the ocean, marked in the centre by three spiring mountains.
At the north end of the Esk Meals there is an opening in the sand-hills about a quarter of a mile broad, through which three small rivers, the Esk, the Mite, and the Irt, discharge themselves in one stream into the sea. At high water the sea on its confluence with these rivers spreads over a wide space within the sand-hills, which on the retiring of the tide is left, except in the channels of the rivers, a dreary extent of sand, mud, and marsh. On the border of this dismal waste stands Ravenglass, a dirty, ragged, forlorn looking town, which, considered in all its relations, in its own wretchedness, and the dreariness of its situation, may be pronounced perhaps to be the most miserable place, with the title of a town, in the kingdom. There is no trade of any kind in it, the people picking up a scanty subsistence by fishing, which in the summer season they help out by labouring at the harvest. We had seen and were to see nothing so mournfully bad as Ravenglass, but we observed in few of the small towns and villages of Cumberland that appearance of comfort, neatness, and comeliness, which distinguishes those in the adjoining county of Lancaster. The people of this county [are described in a long passage; they apparently combine lack of cleanliness and "some coarseness" with "a great moral simplicity, which keeps their passions in order"].
When the tide is in, Ravenglass is not very easily to be approached from the sea side. A cart which we had the luck to meet transported us over the Esk on our entrance into the town, but we had to cross the Mite and the Irt before we could pursue our journey along the coast, and had to wait for some hours before they became fordable. It may illustrate my remarks on the backwardnes of these people in the common arts of life, when I relate that there has been a town here for some centuries, and that no great discoverer has yet adverted to the convenience of a ferry-boat, though with every tide there is some one to feel the want of it. There is a wooden bridge over the Mite, designed by a native engineer, and built so as to be of as little use as possible, being so low that it is passable only when the tide is out and the river fordable.
We had long since arrived at the philosophy of being amused with the little obstacles that we met with in the course of our journey; and have often laughed at the shifts and machinations to which we have seen people driven in compassing for us the most simple and practivcable accommodations... On arriving at Ravenglass we had proposed to the inhabitants to procure for us a couple of horses, and all the ingenuity and industry of the town were put in requisition to get them ready. We were never doomed to see them however, though entertained from time to time during our stay with a series of reports upon their modes of progress towards us. They were out at grass; a boy was dispatched after them, and another after him, and a third after both; they had strayed into a distant field, but after prodigious efforts were caught and coming, and so continued for some hours, when the Mite became fordable, and we were content to think no more about them.
From the little bridge on the Mite we had a sublime view of the mountains [details given, with description of the Screes from an earlier traveller's narrative]... With these grand objects constantly in view, exhibited under ever-changing appearances, we had no reason to complain of the dulness of or way, though immediately upon the coast, our peculiar province, all was blank and uninteresting. After crossing the Mite and the Irt our course lay over a flat common bounded by a line of sand-hills, thrown up to the height of thirty or forty feet."...


NB: Note on the Selker Bay " Roman gallies" in the Addenda to volume II of W. Hutchinson "History of Cumberland" (1797)
BOOTLE.] In a letter from the Rev. William Singleton, of Hanslope, Bucks. it is observed to us, That, "The sunken vessels or gallies, mentioned in the account of this place, page 561, I never heard of, till I met with them in your book, though I resided in that part most of my life."
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As a bonus, a further note on the tidal problem at Ravenglass, from "A Journal Kept in the Isle of Man" by Richard Townley Esq., published in 1791 by Ware & Son of Whitehaven.
22 Jul 1789: "I left Whitehaven about nine, in order to proceed to Bootle." ... "The ford, at Ravenglass, is the worst I ever encountered any where, for the length of it. No person should dare to pass there, before the tide is entirely out, or the current reduced to a very shallow one."
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