As seen from blogs ‘Sculcoates 1 and 2’ (5th and 6th April) Sculcoates, before the building of New Dock (Queen’s Dock), was a rural parish, the village/hamlet being close to the west bank of the River Hull. This would have been a precarious site and a less obvious one than, for example, the spring-line settlements of Hessle, Anlaby, Kirk Ella and Cottingham on the far west edge of the River Hull floodplain. However, excavations in the 1980s revealed compelling evidence that Roman-British scattered settlements existed along the natural levee of the west bank of the River.
Although flooding had the potential to damage property it brought a benefit. I have a notion that, apart from a threat to life for humans, farm animals, transport animals and pets, flooding may in past centuries have been seen as an acceptable hazard on floodplain locations. Probate inventories often valued domestic property located on the first floor of a house greater than that on the ground floor and anyway stout wooden furniture could be cleaned, unlike today when electrical, gas and digital domestic services can so easily be wrecked as well as soft furnishings.
The ‘benefit’ would have been very important to the rural parish of Sculcoates. Although rural the parish was within walking distance of a densely populated town (Kingston upon Hull) so the rich soils (mix of estuarine and riverine silts) of the parish would have been given over to grassland on which cow-keepers animals grazed or the then equivalent of today’s market gardens. The town, especially Market Place immediately east of Holy Trinity church, now Lowgate, providing a ready market. It has been noted that Sculcoates had been enclosed by the early 17th century (see Sculcoates 1 and 2) so it may have become quite a dispersed settlement. A flood then provided another layer of silt to fertilise the fields and would have enabled farmers to have a dense number of animals per acre grazing the rich grassland.
(to be continued).
Point of View 4 = As a non-scientist I have become convinced that this is the most golden age of scientific discovery; the building blocks of Life being discovered, the extent, nature of and origin of the Universe being discovered and the means whereby planet Earth might be saved or destroyed – all these and much more. Such studies should be fundamental to modern school and further education studies with some of the creative and liberal studies seeming comparatively of little use now.