June 2019

The photo. above was taken at a point on the coast of Sunk Island near Hawkin’s Point, this at low tide and showing Cleethorpes water tower in the distance across the Estuary. It shows the mudflat foreshore, covered by shallow, brackish water at high tide and a little inlet in the vegetated foreshore. Here the silence […]

In mentioning recently to Ian Wilkinson, ex-work colleague and active member of Hessle Local History Soc., of my current blog title he commented that he and his wife sometimes drive to Sunk Island, particularly the part around Stone Creek, for although the landscape is monotonous the magic is to ‘hear the quietness’ (this not so at

It is not known whether the mudflat that was to become Sunk Island was established by the early-mid 14th century when Ravenser was functioning as a port (s.p.b.s). Certainly two centuries later when Lord Burleigh commissioned the first navigational map of the Humber Estuary (c. 1560) the mudflat on which, at its western end, the

The picture above is taken from a book about Romano-British buildings, this reconstruction compiled from evidence found in an archaeological dig in central London in the 1990s. It shows that the style of wall-building known generally as wattle-and-daub had a very long history stretching from the Romano-British era to the  18th century. The timber skeleton of

It is intriguing to try to imagine what Raverser Odd (s.p.b.) looked like in its heyday, 1320s. Were there streets or just waterside warehouses with associated staithes and merchants houses and counting rooms, much like medieval High St. (originally Hull St.), Kingston upon Hull? What building materials and styles/size of buildings existed on Ravenser Odd?

The above photo shows a tanker ship moored to a buoy in the mouth of the Humber Estuary. The picture was taken looking south from above the scrubland at the southern end of Spurn Point. In the distance, and just visible, is the south bank of the Estuary at Humberstone and Cleethorpes. The odd thing about Ravenser