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The above picture was taken during an afternoon visit recently to Hornsea on the Holderness coast. A fine warm day with, thankfully, an off-shore gentle breeze. As soon as she is on the beach Molly is off in a dash-around on the sand and in the shallow water, no more than that, basically a wimp. […]

In the final part of chapter VIII (Tidal Land Reclamation – Works) the authors of Tidal Lands (s.p.b.s) go into some technical detail about concrete flood defences as being trialled in the Netherlands in the early 20th century (published 1918). Considerable stretches of the Humber flood bank are concrete barriers to tidal water ingress. All the tidal

The authors of Tidal Lands (s.p.b.s) write of ‘keying up’ in connection with the reinforcing of the seaward flood bank slope with blocks of stone, usually chalk in this region, sometimes other more available stone elsewhere. The skill of the worker(s) was to not just dump the stone from the barge on the side of the

Picture above taken from bedroom window showing short section of Humber Estuary clay bank, meadow in foreground, passing ship and north tower of Humber Bridge in distance. Clay banks, linear earthen banks to hold back tidal water, have clearly been constructed by Man for centuries along areas of lowland coast. The effectiveness of such a

Having considered Sunk Island the authors of Tidal Lands then describe the clay banks of ‘Holland’ in some detail. The background to this is that about 50% of the Netherlands is below one metre above sea level, 28% being below sea level. The techniques of reclaiming coastal lowlands have been pioneered by the Dutch since the

‘This art (the ‘inning’ of saltings and coastal marshes) is coeval with civilisation’ (Tidal Lands, p.121). The authors use the interesting term ‘slob land’ to define un-reclaimed coastal lowland marsh land (often saltmarsh) – whether the word ‘slob’ was first used in its human context or environmental context I have yet to find out, in neither