All Saints church Skipsea in Holderness is shown above, viewed from the south-east. Almost immediately west of the church stands the ‘motte’ and related earthworks of Skipsea Castle, almost immediately east of the church is the axis of much of the village of Skipsea.
An article in the recent journal (Vol. 42) of the Society of Landscape Studies caught-my-eye as it was entitled ‘Landscape, place and identity: the castles of the Holderness Plain, East Yorkshire’ and written by Elaine Jamieson Ph.D who works for Historic England. The plural ‘castles’ implied that there were more than the two I knew of namely Skipsea Castle and the one beside the old route of the Hull to Hornsea railway line (now a public foot and cycle way) in the parish of Swine and just east of the relatively new housing in Sutton. This latter one Ms. Jamieson calls Branceholme Castle and despite apparently being a motte and earthworks dates from the 14th and 15th centuries and is now re-interpreted as ‘a viewing platform or look-out post belonging to Swine Nunnery’ pre-Reformation, in other words not a Norman castle, this being the main thrust of Ms. Jamieson’s paper. I think the spelling must be the name now spelled Bransholme.
Skipsea Castle site certainly was a Norman castle site and Ms. Jamieson devotes the second half of her paper to an in-depth study of the site and the various episodes in the history of it, connected communities and land ownership. I will therefore only paraphrase the first half of the paper which deals with more general issues.
Of course Skipsea does not have a surviving stone keep on the motte as can be seen at; Tower of London, Clifford’s Tower York, Norwich Castle, Lincoln Castle and Connisborough Castle for example.