A bay is a recessed, coastal body of water that directly connects to a larger main body of water, such as an ocean, a lake, or another bay. A large bay is called a gulf, sound, or bight. A cove is a type of smaller bay with narrow entrance. A fjord is a steep bay shaped by glacial activity. A bay can be the estuary of a river, such as the Chesapeake Bay, an estuary of the Susquehanna River. Bays may be nested within each other; some large bays, such as the Bay of Bengal and Hudson Bay, have varied marine geology. The land surrounding a bay reduces the strength of winds and blocks waves. Bays may have as wide a variety of shoreline characteristics as other shorelines. In some cases, bays have beaches, which "are characterized by a steep upper foreshore with a broad, flat fronting terrace". Bays were significant in the history of human settlement because they provided safe places for fishing, they were important in the development of sea trade as the safe anchorage they provide encouraged their selection as ports.

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea defines a bay as a well-marked indentation whose penetration is in such proportion to the width of its mouth as to contain land-locked waters and constitute more than a mere curvature of the coast. An indentation shall not, however, be regarded as a bay unless its area is as large as, or larger than, that of the semi-circle whose diameter is a line drawn across the mouth of that indentation. There are various ways; the largest bays have developed through plate tectonics. As the super-continent Pangaea broke up along curved and indented fault lines, the continents moved apart and left large bays. Bays form through coastal erosion by rivers and glaciers. A bay formed by a glacier is a fjord. Rias are characterised by more gradual slopes. Deposits of softer rocks erode more forming bays, while harder rocks erode less leaving headlands. Bay platform – A dead-end railway platform at a railway station that has through lines Great capes – The three major capes of the traditional clipper route Headlands and bays – Coastal landforms

Pulford Castle is in the village of Pulford, England south of St Mary's Church. It is listed as a Scheduled Ancient Monument; the castle is a small motte and bailey guarding the crossing of Pulford Brook, which forms the border between England and Wales, adjacent to the Wrexham–Chester road. It was founded in the 12th century by Robert de Pulford. Only the earthworks remain. In 1313, a jury of the Chester county court found that the lord of Little Caldy held that manor by the service of'palisading' of Robert de Pulford's castle at Pulford. List of Scheduled Monuments in Cheshire List of castles in Cheshire Reynolds, Susan.

Carola Bluhm is a German politician. Since 1991 she has been a member of the Berlin House of Representatives. In 2009 she became a member of the Senate of Berlin in which, between 16 October 2009 and 2011, she served as senator for Integration and Social Affairs in the Red–red coalition administration of Klaus Wowereit. Carola Freundl was her married name. However, following the break up of her marriage she announced in 2005 that she was reverting to her maiden name. Carola Bluhm was born in East Berlin, her parents were both lawyers. Despite spending her first two and a half decades in the German Democratic Republic, she grew up in an "open academic household" where "critical debate took place every day". By her own account, she was encouraged to think for herself, an attitude of mind which found its way into her political approach, she undertook a vocational education at school, passing her school leaving exams in 1982. This opened the way for a career in fruit and vegetable production, a valued profession in a country where, at least in the cities, fresh produce was in short supply.

The experience was formative. After ten years at school in Berlin with the same classmates she was based in Brandenburg an der Havel, for the first time away from the capital and working with new colleagues. Ruefully she would look back on the apple harvest period when comrades started work sometimes as early as 04.00 in the morning each day, not taking time off at weekends, in order to harvest the apples with a teutonic determination to ensure that apples sorted and packed were of perfect quality, only to suffer the bitter experience of seeing their work become pointless as the fruit deteriorated in the crates because of logistical failures whereby the authorities were unable to arrange timely transportation to the shops. She joined the party in 1982 and became a candidate for local political office soon afterwards, but was never blind to the practical imperfections of the one-party East German state in action. Passing her Abitur and her "fruit gardening education" had opened the way to a university level education: between 1982 and 1987 she attended the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Her mother was fiercely opposed to her subject choice, preferring that she should obtain a degree in something less politically charged involving landscape gardening. However, Bluhm picked Sociology which, consistent with the time and place, was taught through the prism of party approved Marxism–Leninism; the teaching was soundly structured and she emerged with a degree in 1987. Much of the focus of her studies involved the difficulties arising with the massive housing redevelopments that were a feature of East Germany in the 1980s. Older people whose children had left home were reluctant to relocate and lose all the friends and associations of the areas where they had brought up their families, while for younger people with children there was a resulting shortage of sufficiently large apartments. There was no attempt to avoid studying social issues and processes arising in the country, but any thought of discussing the interaction of such issues with the overall political structure of the country was a total taboo for academics involved in sociological or empirical social research work.

Her daughter was born in 1985. East Germany had long suffered from a desperate shortage of working age population thanks to the slaughter of war in the 1940s and industrial scale emigration from east to west during the 1940s and through the 1950s; the government was eager to encourage more children: supported by a flexible system and by her family Bluhm was able to combine intense study with motherhood. Her son was born in 1988. Between 1987 and 1991 she was employed as a research assistant at the Institute for Socialist Economic Management at the Berlin Economics Academy. During the 1980s the East German political establishment suffered a crisis of confidence as the winds of Glasnost blowing across from Moscow left old certainties looking less than certain, while intensifying industrial and commercial rivalry between the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic made the future look less secure, highlighting the dire fiscal position of the savagely indebted East German economy. In university sociology departments there was little appetite for undermining the state by focusing on the stark dysfunctionalities of the socialist state, but nor was it possible to overlook objective facts.

Someone in Bluhm's position might have been expecting to work towards a doctorate and pursue a university career as a sociology professor, but as academic career opportunities faded away Carola Bluhm switched to politics not by design, but in response both to her personal situation, as the mother of two young children, to national events. Matters came to a head after November 1989 when protesters breached the wall and it became apparent that the fraternal Soviet forces had no instructions to suppress the street protests by force, as they had in 1953. A succession of unstoppable events were set in train, leading to East Germany's first free and fair election in March 1990 and formally in October 1990, German reunification. At the hitherto important Berlin Economics Academy Carola Bluhm's career prospects disappeared. In 1990 she was informed succinctly in writing that she was being temporarily laid off and six months her job disappeared permanently (although according to her own website she remained, at