It’s possibly odd to suggest that this three-mile-long finger of sand, marram grass and buckthorn spine all pointing toward oblivion in the North Sea is my key foundational landscape. Because, in truth, I’d neglected to visit for 45 years.
Throughout my youth, this rather unloved fragment of Holderness, with its flattened geometry of pasture, hedge and wartime tank trap, was the map on which most of my dreams were fixed. It’s where I recorded a first migrant whimbrel, and heard my first grey plover, that exquisite piped note coming like liquid melancholy out of the Humber mist. I recall clearly the moment, aged 13, when I laid eyes for the first time on a golden oriole. For goodness sake, here also is where I met my first red-legged partridges, because this was the place in all my early years.
It’s now stranger to describe Spurn as foundational, given that it’s the most rapidly eroding British coastline. For many of us, favourite places are the fixed points against which we chart our own wanderings, but when I returned this month, while I seemed almost the same, Spurn was weirdly unfamiliar. Gone were the tank blocks, the lighthouse cottages and not just the old wartime railtrack to Spurn Point but the road itself, along with many of its sea defences and even whole fields.
The most telling is a wall plaque at the old Bluebell shop (now cafe), which commemorated its distance from the sea in 1847: 532 yards. A 1994 inscription adjusted it to 190 yards and I paced it out to the tideline to bring the figure up to date: 135 steps.
Some things at Spurn are not changed. It’s still the most wonderful mainland location to observe bird migration, and twice every day the tide withdraws deep into the Humber, leaving an immense plain of mud, dotted with millions of wormcasts, where 135,000 waterbirds still come to feed. Yet there was one micro-change we delighted to note. In 1880, the naturalist John Cordeaux described how, as the “sun dips beyond the western world … the oozy mudflats are purple with reflected light”. We logged the colour as a pale orange marble.
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