Spurn Head is one of the oddest places in Britain. It
waggles, like a reversed, beckoning finger, out into the
whirling estuary where the wide-spread River Humber meets
the North Sea. Every day, every hour almost, it moves a
little, fidgets, just a few inches, until, at the end of a
year, it had taken up a new place ; at the end of a
decade, it is noticeably adrift, and every century, it has
completely removed itself to another place. At uniform
intervals of two hundred and fifty years, it has been
washed away altogether, sent sprawling into the beds of
the river and the sea, only to reform gamely in small
islands which eventually become another Spurn Head. The
present two-and-a-half centuries is almost up.
It is a place of sand and mist and ever-moving water, of
gales and gulls, of rare grasses, flowers and brilliant
butterflies. Once, during the First World War, soldiers
manned a gun on its very tip. There was a comic little
railway which connected them to civilisation three and a
half miles away, and on the railway used to run a truck
propelled by sail ! That is one of the happiest thoughts,
images, I have discovered during my journey through
Britain. I can just imagine these soldiers, jolly with
beer, being blown along the helter-skelter of a track on
wild nights, the sail bucking and cracking, the gunners
hanging on. There was one sharp bend in the track where
the sail had to be luffed. Many times the odd-wheeled ship
(or full-masted train) was wrecked there.
Today, to follow the railway, is to realise how much the
headland has moved since those days sixty-five years ago.
What had been a straight run, apart from the single, epic,
elbow bend, is now running in all directions except the
original. In some places the track careers almost at
right-angles to the sandy land, at others it burrows into
dunes and marram grass at a sharp angle, and in some
areas, it has tipped into the sea. Nothing remains the
same on Spurn Head; not for long.
The misty and singular peninsular is, notwithstanding its
isolation and frequent loneliness, within sight of the
wharfs, the cranes and buildings of the fishing city of
Hull. It lies to the east of the port, tacked on to the
very conclusion of what is now called Humberside (note:
written back in the early 70's), but to most is still
doggedly the East Riding of Yorkshire. The folk who
inhabit the villages in the flat, green mainland, the root
of Spurn Head, even count themselves a people apart from
the rest of Yorkshire. The Clublys, the Stothards, the
Biglings, who form the stronghold within the poplulace,
even now say they are "East Enders" and their dialect,
when issuing forth into the bar of the White Horse at
Easington, defies understanding even by those people who
live within a few miles. It's that sort of place.
I drove south from Beverley, the old market, racing and
churchy town, over the hamlets of the green plain to reach
Spurn. It was a sharp and sunny day. There had been a dry
spell in a rainy summer and the fields shone, the houses
preened themselves like ducks, and the splendid inn signs
of the North Country Brewery (the best I have ever seen)
stood like a picture gallery along the way ; enough to
catch the eye of the most arid tee-totaller.
Easington, Skeffling, Patrington, Welwick and Out Newton
are settled, and have been for Yorkshire centuries, in
that flat triangle of meadows and ditches between the
North Sea and the maw of the Humber. Sunk Island is now
inland, although they murmur that the steeple of a church
can be seen offshore ; Kilnsea is the last hamlet before
you take the tight road to the ever-moving sands of Spurn
Head.
The villages were still half asleep for it was early and a
Sunday. A bell from a church, sitting amid the meadows,
nodded a reminder of the day, sheep gnawed, and a man on a
horse with a small milk churn fixed to the saddle just
like a drum, clopped along the lane. The sky was bright
and wide and warm. Then I came to Spurn Head.
At once, the scene was changed. Now, it all became
mystery. A glove of mist enclosed the hand that reached
out to the sea. It lay, still, along the flat sands, and
giving a line of war-time tank-traps the aspect of strange
warriors marching from the water. A foghorn groaned and
then I saw the form of a great vessel, a tanker no doubt,
a creeping city out in the estuary.
My road diminished to a single track and the single track
diminished into fog, but then a slice of sun slid through
and touched the river and the sea, only a few yards on
either side of me. Islands of vegetation moved slyly,
scarves of mist advanced again, the horn hoo-hooted like a
baritone owl. I was glad when the small, busy figure of a
lady called Brenda Jackson materialised through the mist.
She was out in this place charged with looking after the
birds, the plants and flowers for the Yorkshire
Naturalists Trust, who now own the three and a half miles
of Spurn. The regular warden was away, and she was
thrilled to be there, alone in the little hut between the
eroding sea and the eroding river. The winds and clouds
were her company.
Next to her temporary home is a cobble hut which used to
be the coastal bailiff's house. "He doesn't exist now,"
she explained. It was his job to take the dues from the
people who came with carts, years ago, to shovel up the
pebbles and sand from the seashore. They were used in
building, and the takers paid by the load. Then somebody
realised that the sea was taking away enough without
people doing it too, so that was stopped." The Industrial
Revolution had finished on Spurn Head.
"I haven't been here for some time," said Mrs Jackson.
"And I'm amazed at the way the sea has taken so many great
lumps from the land." We walked up the dunes, past the
heligoland bird trap, a long construction like the ribs of
an aeroplane, used to catch seabirds for ringing. On the
backbone of the dunes, looking straight out to the misty
sea, it was easy to see how the contour of the land had
shifted even quite recently. Massive whorls like the
bendings of an earthquake patterned the shore. A
bird-watchers' hut had, prudently, been moved back in
stages to safety so that it was now yards inland from its
original place.
"I'm afraid I'm a botanist at heart," said Brenda Jackson,
curiously a little fey about the confession. It was almost
as though she feared I might laugh at her, or know more
about it than she and begin to cross-examine her. Seeing I
had no such knowledge nor designs, she quietly touched a
plant near the bird trap. It was oddly exotic to be in
such a northerly situation, almost a stray from the
jungle, with a long, lush, pendant lolling from it. "The
Duke of Argyll's Tea Plant", she announced as though
making a formal introduction. "One of Spurn's own plants.
A small mauve flower, delicate and dainty, and with cream
stamens." She said it like a couplet.
Apparently encouraged, she led me on over the sands. "And
this flower is the Scarlet Pimpernel, which is also called
the Shepherd's Looking-Glass because it oddly opens when
the weather is going to be bright." Her eyes were sharp
with enthusiasm. The sun had come out of the mist. "And
this is sea-sandwort," she said pointing again. "In the
old days, it was a delicacy, used as a pickle. I think the
recipe must have been lost. And there's the sea-holly
which ladies love for flower-arranging, although it is
quite rare in other places. In Elizabethan times, the
roots were used for making children's sweets called
eringoes."
She was in full flight now, darting over the dunes,
finding rare and interesting flowers and plants at every
step - the Pyramidal Orchid, the pink Storksbill, the
Restharrow, a relative of the common or garden pea. It was
difficult for me not to smile at her eagerness. At almost
every yard, she found something worthwhile. What a
wonderful thing, that, in this world, there are still
people that can do that.
Spurn Head has forever been a place of lighthouses. As the
sands have shifted, so have the lighthouses tumbled ; some
are now below the sea. St Catherine's on the Isle of Wight
was the first recorded lighthouse in Britain, and Spurn
Head was the second. It was built, appropriately, by a
hermit, lighthouses being places of singular solitude,
after the sandspit known in fourteenth century maps as
Ravenser Odd had been washed away in its due time and
gradually been replaced by a reformed cape called Ravenser
Spurne, later known simply as The Spor (from 'spur') and,
by Mercater on his map of Britain in 1564 as Spun Head.
In an elegant petition to parliament in 1427, Richard
Reedbarowe, "Heremyte at the Ravensersporne" pointed out
the "many diverses straites and daungers bee in the
entrying into the river of Humbre out of the see where off
tymes by mysaventure many divers vesselx and men, godes
and Marchandises be lost and perished, as well by Day as
be Night, for defaute of a Bekyn".
Henry VI granted him his bekyn so having "compassion and
pitee on the Cristen people that ofte tymes there
perished".
The solicitous and solitary Richard Reedbarowe however,
was not the first to live on the shifting sands of Spurn.
His first-recorded predecessor was one Wilgils, a monk,
who established a minor monastery, probably no more than a
cell there, in about 670AD.
Three hundred years later when the spit had moved its
customary mile westwards, Egil, the Icelander, was wrecked
there, and the stragglers of the defeated Scandinavian
army, routed by Harold at Stamford Bridge, embarked from
the beaches of Spurn as the English king was hurrying
south to his death in 1066.
By the late thirteenth century, Ravenser Odd (the Odd
being a cape or headland) was a prospering port boasting a
market, a fair, and from 1304 a Member of Parliament. But
the sea and the river made their regular claim and forty
years later the constituency and the town were two-thirds
tumbled to the tides. By 1360, the gulls and the seals
were playing among the ruins. Now the town of Ravenser Odd
lies below the ships three-quarters of a mile offshore.
There are no legends of people hearing church bells
ringing as the tides change.
Henry Bolingbroke came ashore at Spurn in 1399 looking for
and eventually gaining the throne of England. His
welcoming was confined to one hermit. Edward IV, also
heading for London and the crown, landed on the shingle in
1471.
In 1602, the sea and river were once again advancing on
the headland and Parliament was told of the great 'Dekay
of Ravenspounne'. Soon, all was awash, the tides and the
shoals moved across the sands and man retreated to safer
ground. It was said that a landowner on Spurn Head could
always reclaim his property - if he could wait a century.
After that, the history of Spurn can be followed by the
history of its lighthouses, so many of them lying now
blind beneath the sea.
By the late seventeenth century Spurn was once more poking
its vigorously growing nose out into the waves. A London
man called Justinian Angell thought it might be a fine
place for a lighthouse. He built one, but by the time it
was complete, the land had altered again and sailors
complained that it did more harm than good. So he built
another light to rectify matters and Angell's High Light
and Low Light adorned Spurn Head, but only for a while.
A table of the fortunes (or misfortunes) of the various
cape lighthouses, compiled by the Hull historian G. de
Boer for the East Yorkshire Local Historical Society,
carries a sorry catalogue of phrases which tell all too
well of the folly of building anything - even a lighthouse
- on shifting sands. Tracing the lighthouses from 1674 to
1895, it has one column 'Date of Erection' and another
ominously 'Date of Destruction'. The catalogue of
catastrophes is recorded with such phrases as 'moved',
'surrounded by water', 'taken down', 'moved back',
'disused', 'lantern removed' and 'washed down'. Sometimes
the lights failed through lack of coal to burn and ships
were wrecked.
John Smeaton, that considerable engineer, built two
lighthouses in the nineteenth century; one has now gone
forever, leaving an almost prehistoric circle of
lightkeeper's dwellings which can still be seen today, the
other sits useless and decapitated on the beach half a
mile from the present nose of Spurn � awaiting the
inevitable.
* * *
There is a house and watchtower that looks across the
table of green meadows and marshlands and on to Spurn
Head. It is just beyond the village of Easington on what
might be called the mainland. In it lives John Redvers
Powell Clubly and his wife. He was born in 1900 (Redvers
after General Buller of the Boer War and Powell after
Baden-Powell, hero of Mafeking). All his long life, he has
known Spurn Head. "I always wanted this house," he
explained. "Ever since I was a lad. I liked the
watchtower. It used to belong to the coastguard, but now
it's mine." Inside the front door is a passage lined and
decorated with fragments of glass from Smeaton's High
Lighthouse.
He is a very large, grey man. Once he must have been
powerful. He was a champion darts player renowned
throughout the North Country. "Years ago," he recalled
slowly, "I used to shovel gravel on the Spurn, eight men
shovelling it into a sailing barge. We reckoned to load a
hundred tons in three hours and a half. Three pence for a
hundred tons we got. In all weathers too."
We talked of the great storms that have charged in from
the North Sea across the flat land. "In 1906 we had eleven
feet of water in our house at Hedon," he remembered.
"There was a horse and donkey swimming in our stable."
He has been a lifeboatman too and describes violent nights
when he galloped the farm horses down to the Head to pull
the lifeboat out to sea. And a beachcomber. "You'd never
believe the things I've found along that beach," he said.
"During the war, I found a foot in a boot. I took it to
one of the army people, an officer, and he said I'd best
go and bury it, so I did. It's a very funny sensation
burying just a foot in a boot. Another time, I found a
dead man in one of the creeks. Full of shrimps he was.
I've never touched another shrimp since."
His wife went from the room and returned with Redvers
Clubly's most prized beachcombing treasure - a prehistoric
mammoth's tooth, the size of a large tomcat. "Just found
that one morning, dug it up," he said. "Amazing what you
can find in these parts. I sent it to a museum, but they
said they'd got enough of them."
John Redvers Clubly does not use his first Christian name
because Redvers is more notable, and there's another John
Clubly in the village, his senior by one year. I found him
among the cabbages of his cottage garden, a twinkling
little man whose parents were both Clublys. "There's a lot
of us in these parts," he said. He remembers well the gun
on Spurn Head and the little railway wagon, propelled by a
sail which used to trundle the three miles to Kilnsea, the
first 'mainland' village.
"Once," he remembers with a dry, old chuckle, "they moved
one of the big guns from Spurn Head and they brought it
back on the railway. Right in the Narrows the train broke
down and there was the sea and the Humber washing all
around their gun. That was a laugh."
At Christmas, the young lads and girls from the flat land
villages would walk out to Spurn Head singing carols to
the coastguards and their families and the lighthousemen.
Old John became pensive. "That was wonderful," he said
very quietly. "The wind off the sea, and cold, and
sometimes a moon, and us singing carols and walking all
the way home, lads and lasses holding hands."
After the First War, while the railway was still running
straight, before Spurn fidgetted again, the little engine
and its trucks used to run to and fro. "Edwin Hodgson was
the driver of the engine and a man called Hammond was the
engineer. I remember them even now. The engine squeaking
and rattling along the lines and the little truck - the
Drury Car we called it - bouncing and swinging behind
them. We used to go down to Spurn for fun, like an outing,
the girls all in the Drury Car and the boys hanging on to
the outside."
John Clubly's uncle, who was Tom Wilson, helped to build
the lighthouse which (for the present anyway) blinks from
Spurn Head. His father used to carry the paraffin from
Kilnsea for use on the light. "He used to take it by horse
and cart across Hummabank," he said. It meant Humber Bank.
"When he got over there he used to have a few drinks with
his friends and many's the time I've seen the horse and
cart coming back across the Wormsand, you'd think without
my old dad. But there he'd be, drunk and sleeping in the
bottom of the cart."
Years ago, distressed ships off Spurn Head brought the
sound of a warning gun, and the heavy horses from the
inland farms would be taken galloping down the narrow road
to haul the lifeboat into the sea. Today, the path they
took, like the meandering railway, wanders in a strange
fashion, sometimes heading straight into the sea, having
to be built up and added to and straightened after almost
every stormy winter. But it is a road worth walking. It
goes by an almost primeval landscape of moulded rocks and
whorls of boulder clay, some of which were washed down
here in the most ancient times from the Pennines and from
Scotland and Scandinavia. There are sudden bays, so small
as to be secret, with a surprising copse here and there,
thick stunted trees full of sounding insects, brilliant
butterflies and hiding birds. In the course of one day a
hawkbilled moth and a snow-bunting in its summer plumage
were witnessed. A rare feast.
Out to sea, and at any point the ocean and the river are
never more than a few yards to the left or right; old
groynes and sea defences, breached and defeated by Nature,
stand up from the waves like toothless wrecks. Redvers
Clubly told me they don't make the barricades the proper
way now because they build them of concrete. The wood of
the old days bent and 'gave' to the sea.
The Narrows at Spurn Head is well named, the sea and river
being only fifty yards apart and forever trying to reach
each other like lovers kept distant. One day, they will
succeed. There is also a skulking shoal called Old Den
which was once, in the olden times, an island upon which
there were buildings. No more. The fish now swim in and
out of the doors.
Spurn Head owes whatever semi-permanence it has to the
grasses and the reeds which, miraculously seem to root and
flourish in the most dry and desperate soil. In 1849
Parliament paid for loads of chalk to be transported to
the odd headland to stabilise it; ships entering and
leaving the Humber were finding it shifted faster than the
revisions which reached the navigation charts. A captain,
meticulously going by the book, might find himself staring
into a coastguard's window. The chalk bank gave some
substance and held the Humber at arm's length. It can
still clearly be seen today, its whiteness forming the
base of the seashore rockery, with rare plants, flowers,
and grasses sprouting prettily from its niches.
The present Head of Spurn is a blunt, flotsam-strewn
beach, beyond the new, sturdy coastguard station, the
lighthouse and the jetty used by pilots going out to ships
waiting in the Humber. Some of the coastguard children who
live down there were playing in the sand in the growing
sunshine as generations have before them.
It must always have been a wonderful place for childhood;
the treasure hunts among the litter that the sea brings up
almost daily, the racing and games in the wavy dunes; the
secret bathing bays and paddling beaches; school within
sight of the ships; storms heard from a warm bed; the
birds and wild animals. Grey seals and the 'little
whales', the porpoises, appear in the frothy waters where
the Humber meets the sea; the porpoises in their
travelling circuses, plunging and curling through the
waves, the seals lying indolently on sandbanks basking a
while before lolling into the water again. The stoat and
weasel go about their sly business among the dunes and
grasses; Spurn has its own peculiar race of mice, rabbits
can be seen sitting on the beach like elderly
holiday-makers, fur-coated against the wind, and foxes sit
down to a supper of fish. Brenda Jackson spent a glad,
late hour of the evening before my arrival watching a
vixen and her cubs, out for a dusk walk, pausing to make a
meal of a dead gull. The little terns nesting on the
headland, jealously observed by the conservationists, have
been haunted by accidents. One year, the foxes made a
feast of the young birds; the next a helicopter landed
squarely among the nests, blowing them away with its
rotors; then the sea roared in during the third nesting
season and ended the domesticity of the small sea
swallows.
There is a wreck on the beach facing the North Sea, a
trawler doomed one night long ago. Parts of the hull lie
slotted in the sand, every year diminished by salt and
tide and silt. Many others lie offshore, together with the
lighthouses of former days and that vanished part of
Ravenser Odd. The remnants of groynes long washed away
stand out from the sea like ghostly arms calling for
assistance. Driftwood comes ashore in fantasy shapes. The
bar of the White Horse in Easington is decorated with a
carnival of wood, all in the accidental shape of animals.
Spurn Head is something to almost everyone. The delight of
the lover of ships at seeing the great towering vessels
passing off-shore is matched by the triumph of the
botanist discovering a secret flower or the ornithologist
at the new season's bird migrants. The history seeker may
plod happily about his business, scarcely noticing the
fisherman reeling in his line on a deserted shore.
It is a place to discover solitude and quiet joy, always
remembering that its time, according to its shifting
history, is almost up. The two and a half centuries is
almost gone. Spurn Head may not be there tomorrow.
Leslie Thomas. 1981
* * * * * * * * * *
Rob's Notes on the article above; first written
about 2 yrs ago.
The
Narrows have been breached several times in the last
30 years, and the spit re-instated and a rough tarmac
road re-laid to give access to both the Coastguard
Station and the bird sanctuary. The old cottages are
now all uninhabited other than by duty lifeboatmen on
shift, the lifeboatmen and families having decamped
across to Grimsby.
The lighthouse has been disused for about 10 years,
modern radar and navigation aids making it redundant.
The old narrow-guage railway is now all but invisible,
with just the occasional view of the old iron rails
set in the sectional concrete road just visible. It's
the road sections that move with the storms and
mis-align themselves, making what is left of the
railway appear to jump from side to side.
The dunes on either side of the lane down the spit are
up to about 12-15 feet high, and topped and bound
together still with marram grass. When on the lane, it
can be quite sheltered from a sea wind by the dunes.
Views of the sea and river are glimpsed between the
dunes as one drives or walks down the 3-mile lane, as
are the occasional hexagonal concrete pill-boxes that
used to sit atop the dunes, built as a precaution
against the expected Nazi invasion of 1940-41. Most of
them have now slipped down onto the beach, many below
the sand.
The road is no longer open for free public access. A
charge of �5 is made at the little hut at the top of
the spit. No dogs are allowed, not even on a lead.
The very tip of the headland, and right around the
point, has a steeper beach than most photos show. The
drop of the tide is quite spectacular, and more akin
to a deep riverbank. In the middle of the 'island' of
the headland, it is quite sunken and sheltered behind
the dunes, a haven for birds amongst the stunted trees
and undergrowth. On a warm day, it can get quite hot
in there.
The point is made of mixed shingle and sand. Mostly
shingle. And mud on the river side. It's a lonlier
place now than it used to be. Since the public have
been stopped from driving down (anyone can still walk
down, but 3 miles is a bit much for modern folk),
there's few visitors at all.
I fear the big storm that will take Spurn away, for it
will do more than rattle our slates in East Hull. It
strikes me that if Hull, and indeed even Goole, are to
continue to thrive as ports, then our authorities need
to re-learn some of the tricks the Victorians knew,
and find the monies to fund those tricks. Ever since I
first read Leslie Thomas' article, I've always
realised that Spurn is, to all intents and purposes,
Hull's natural breakwater, our own harbour wall if we
can view it as that.
It also seems to me that, had it not been for those
extensive wartime defences built during both world
wars, the concrete roads and railway for access, the
pill-boxes, the observation posts and the like, the
narrow neck of Spurn may well not have lasted as long
as it has. Military intervention gave us the Spurn we
knew in the post-war years, which in themselves served
pretty well holding back the forces of nature for
another 50 years or so. But now the sea and nature are
taking hold, winning back what they would have already
had by the 1960s or before if those concrete roads and
emplacements had never been built in the first place.
Much of that concrete can now be seen down on the
windswept beach, gradually breaking up. And even now,
whilst they are there, all smashed up, they are still
helping just a bit to delay the total breach of the
spit and the day when the island of Spurn will be
permament, and not just at high tide. If that is
allowed to happen, then Hull's days as a port are
numbered. The money HAS to be found, the engineering
and defence work has to be done.
Otherwise, City of Culture or no, without such
thriving ports, Hull may not be considered 'economic
enough' by ever-so-thrifty governments to be even
thought worth saving from these hungry tides. We
certainly can't go on as we are. Culture is of no use
to anyone when the streets are under 4ft of sea water.
In the long run, it will be cheaper to rebuild those
dunes now, protect the spit again with wooden groynes,
and so protect the Humber seaway itself, rather than
abandon a huge city to the rising waters. It's a moot
point, but if a major part of Hull did become
uninhabitable, Beverley wouldn't be exactly high and
dry either.
Our 'Authorities' need to start re-learning those
tricks sharpish. Time is not on our side. As Leslie
Thomas did, and suggests, you only have to look at
history to see what's coming. But it doesn't have to
be that way, it could be defended and last for another
100 years or more. It's not a question of whether it
can be done, even Victorian engineers with their
limited equipment managed it, along huge sections of
Britain's coastline. It's a question of whether it
will be done, and for a nation that can partake in
space exploration and send hundreds of millions of
pounds abroad to help with disaster relief, no-one
will convince me that it cannot be afforded. We have a
disaster of our own, slowly unfolding here and now,
and it needs attending to. Or we'll all need more than
wellies!
Rob the webmaster: Dec 2013.
