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.
