Why the treacherous lure of quivering quicksand haunts our nightmares

In the spring of 2026, BBC News carried warnings of quicksand at Cocklawburn Beach near Berwick-upon-Tweed. Coastguard alerts about quicksand in the Aln Estuary and at Boulmer Haven in Northumberland followed shortly afterwards. Although none of these locations is within 50 miles of my home, the news still sent a shiver down my spine.

As a child, I was terrorised by the thought of sinking in quicksand. I envisioned myself being pulled down into the glutinous depths by unseen hands until the only sign of my presence was a few bubbles and perhaps a school cap floating on the stodgy surface.

My fear came not from personal experience (to this day, I have never encountered quicksand), but from reading Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ adventures (George and her dog Timmy seemed to spend part of every story sinking up to their necks in mud), watching television (a particularly traumatic quicksand scene filled the closing credits of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons) and the silver screen (in ‘Tarzan’ films, the only thing more likely to happen to the naïve European hunter than sinking up to his chin in gloop was awakening to find a giant spider crawling up his arm).

I am not alone in my anxiety. Social media reveals that my phobia about quicksand is shared by hundreds of thousands of people. Most of them, like me, were born in the 1960s or in the decade that followed. This was an era when quicksand loomed so large in the lives of children that Parker Brothers — the company behind Monopoly and Risk — brought out a board game devoted to its perils.

Baby boomers may have lived through a golden age of quicksand, but history suggests that it isn’t only our generation that has been scared witless by the thought of being sucked down by something that — at least in its screen appearances — looks similar to a semolina pudding. Quicksand has been the stuff of nightmares for thousands of years. It features on the Bayeux Tapestry — future English King Harold Godwinson is depicted rescuing two soldiers from quicksand near Mont-Saint-Michel in northern France — and in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, in which it serves as an allegory for losing moral grounding. By the 1720s, slurping sands that swallowed heroes and heroines alike had become such a cliché of overwrought epic verse that Alexander Pope lampooned bad poets who thickened their descriptions ‘here and there with Quicksand’.

How to escape a sticky situation

• Stay calm — thrashing around will only make you sink faster

• Lighten your load and cast aside your rucksacks, backpacks and so on

• Lean back. Distributing your weight over the greatest possible area will help you float

• Wiggle slowly. Circular motions with your legs will allow water to gradually seep downwards and break the suction

• Roll or slither. Once your legs are nearer the surface slowly and gently roll or army crawl to safety

Undeterred by Pope’s sneering, quicksand continued to make its malevolent, squelchy presence felt in literature. Sir Walter Scott, who lived not so far from Berwick-upon-Tweed, was fond of ‘quivering sand’. In Redgauntlet, the protagonist Darsie Latimer gets trapped in some on the Solway Firth and narrowly escapes drowning as the tide races in. Meanwhile, the unfortunate Edgar Ravenswood in The Bride of Lammermoor rides into quicksand; all that’s left is the feather from his hat. This is more than survives of poor Rosanna Spearman in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The Yorkshire maid is both repelled and fascinated by the ‘Shivering Sand’ that lines the coast, fantasising that it holds the bodies of hundreds of souls. Eventually, she voluntarily joins them.

In R. D. Blackmore’s classic of star-crossed Exmoor lovers, Lorna Doone, the villainous Carver Doone disappears into the sands of the Wizard’s Slough and in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr Watson watches in horror as a Dartmoor pony sinks into the Grimpen Mire. That there is no quicksand on Dartmoor was no matter in numerous screen versions of both novels — and the treacherous Devonian mires are indeed as sticky as reheated porridge.

If novelists and poets love quicksand, their passion for it is nothing compared to that of film-makers. Quicksand made its big screen debut in the 1909 Gaumont melodrama Saved from the Quicksands. Since then, it has swallowed up people and animals in Hollywood films as diverse as The Swiss Family Robinson, Lawrence of Arabia, Blazing Saddles and The Princess Bride.

In real life, quicksand is altogether less ubiquitous than in fiction. The quicksand of Dartmoor is a novelist’s fantasy, although that on the Solway Firth is not. It is also an ever-present danger at the extensive sandflats of Cumbria and Lancashire’s Morecambe Bay (where a Royal Guide has helped people navigate around it since the reign of King John) and along the notoriously dangerous Broomway in Essex. In recent years, quicksand has been reported near Whitby in North Yorkshire, Rhyl in North Wales, Walcott and Mundesley in north Norfolk and along the Channel coast at Lancing, West Sussex, and Barton on Sea, Hampshire.

No sooner has it arrived than it is gone again, because quicksand is a capricious phenomenon — which is one of the things that makes it dangerous. Formed of water-saturated sand, silt and clay, quicksand loses its structural strength when agitated. It is firm ground that turns liquid when something — or somebody — steps on it. This singular nature means that the more you struggle, the quicker you go down.

However, the gritty sludge is by no means as directly lethal as the fictional version. Physics dictates that an object only sinks until it has displaced its own weight. Quick-sand is roughly twice as dense as the human body, so most people will only go down up to their waist. Yet, it’s not all good news. The suction of quicksand is so powerful that attempting to pull your leg rapidly from it would require the strength needed to lift a family car. Quicksand won’t swallow you whole, but it can hold you in its powerful grip until hypothermia, exhaustion or dehydration sets in.

There’s also — as Sir Walter Scott’s hero Darsie Latimer discovers — the danger of a rising tide. It was this combination of sludgy suction and the incoming sea that resulted in the tragic deaths of 23 cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004. The shivering sands may not suck people down into the muddy depths as they do in stories and films, but they haunt our nightmares for a reason.

This feature originally appeared in the September 2, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe