On the promenade at Withernsea, on Britain’s East Yorkshire coast, next to the public toilets, there is a beautiful memorial engraved in stone, framed by waist-high sculptures of two churches. These are the Sister Kirkes, named for a local medieval myth that told of two sisters who could not agree on the style of the church they wished to build – so they each built their own: one with a steeple, the other with a tower. ‘The sea eventually claimed both,’ the plaque reports, matter-of-factly.
Courtesy Wikipedia
Owthorne, site of one of the drowned churches, is one of around 30 ‘lost villages’ along the 61 km of the Holderness coast, from Flamborough Head in the north, down to Spurn Head, at the mouth of the Humber river. One of 30 lost settlements we know the names of, that is: places that existed, and ceased to exist, in the past millennium. Holderness is the fastest-eroding coastline in Europe (at a rate of 2 metres a year), along with nearby north Norfolk – the process long preceding the climate crisis. Thomas Sheppard’s The Lost Towns of the Yorkshire Coast (1912) includes a map illustrating the thick strip of land lost to the waves since Roman times, showing many of those lost settlements: Colden Parva, Hartburn, Dimlington, Monkwike and, most famously, Ravenser Odd, a medieval pirate utopia of great renown and influence.
Skipsea, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. Untitled photo by Neil A. White from the series Lost Villages
Long before Ravenser Odd was washed away in a 14th-century storm called Grote Mandrenke (the Great Drowning), what is now East Yorkshire was part of Doggerland; a vast and ancient continent that, when the last ice age ended, thawed to leave what we now call the North Sea. The Holderness coast is composed of glacial deposits, much of it clay, but also sands and gravels, all easily washed away by the tide. The sea has been pressing back into the boulder clay here for centuries, claiming churches, homes, villages and lives. Ten miles north of Withernsea, at Aldbrough, I saw a recently tarmacked road charging confidently out into thin air like something from a Road Runner cartoon.
Withernsea itself is one of three towns on the Holderness coast with comprehensive ‘hard defences’ consisting of rock armour, concrete sea walls, great sloping revetments and rock groynes. The upsetting reality for anyone with an attachment, home or business on this coastline is that such armour is eye-wateringly expensive – Withernsea’s wall cost £6.3 million, £5,000 per metre, to construct. Protecting all 61 km of coastline would be impossible. Immediately south of Withernsea’s hard defences, jagged, tooth-like indentations into the brown clay cliffs are visible. ‘The difficult truth,’ says Dan Parsons, professor of geosciences at Loughborough University, ‘is [that] some of these settlements may be beyond saving.’ In 2019, Emma Howard Boyd, the then chair of the Environment Agency, said: ‘We can’t win a war against water by building away climate change with infinitely high flood defences.’ Parsons put it more succinctly: ‘We can’t win a war against water.’
Climate change discourse often centres on two temporalities: the urgent extremes of the present – hurricanes, heat deaths, fires and floods – and the deadlines, targets and forecasts that stretch into our futures and those of generations yet unborn. Campaigners are at pains to remind power-brokers that climate change is not tomorrow’s problem: settlements and communities are disappearing under the waves right now, being engulfed in flames and suffocating in air that we’ve poisoned.
What role can the past play in guiding us through this anxious structure of feeling? When a village like Owthorne sinks beneath the waves, it is not gone forever, but woven into the historical memory of the area. Even the physical fabric leaves traces: salvaged stones from Holderness’s lost Sister Kirkes, for example, were used to build the chancel of Withernsea’s Grade II*-listed St Nicholas church. Such material continuity, though small, marks a kind of radical pragmatism that has flourished in the shifting sands of Holderness. In the face of the thunderous North Sea, it’s not defeatism or denial that strikes the loudest note in Withernsea, but a radical acceptance of the inevitability of change.
Given the emphasis on community and belonging in our cultural moment, the impulse to save everything we can is understandable: to restore storm-damaged buildings, hold back the tide, snuff out the wildfires, and show that by outwitting nature we are still our own masters. There’s an implicit guilt behind these salvage attempts: a recognition that our suffering now and in future is caused by what we ourselves have wrought. In Pacifica, on the California coast, the local administration talks about ‘managed retreat’ to describe its medium-term evacuation process in response to wildfires, to the dismay and anger of some residents. The episode of the podcast This American Life telling their stories was headlined ‘Apocalypse Now-ish’. Politically, it is an invidious problem – no politician wants to be accused of ‘abandoning a community’, or to tell someone who loves their home: ‘It’s time to go – and to let go.’
In letting go, we salvage what we can from the wreckage, whether altarpieces or stories
Parsons’s warning that some coastal settlements may be ‘beyond saving’ chimes with Caitlin DeSilvey’s Curated Decay (2017), a book that navigates this same uneven terrain of loss, heritage and historical memory. ‘Even when a decision has been made to accept eventual ruination,’ writes DeSilvey, a geographer at the University of Exeter, ‘in moments of threat, it is extremely difficult to step back and allow destruction to continue unchecked.’ But perhaps our relationships with the built and natural world around us would be more healthy if we were honest about their precarity, and our own. DeSilvey cites Greg Kennedy, of An Ontology of Trash (2007): ‘Authentic care senses the truth of death and discloses it accordingly.’
Can we learn to embrace impermanence? Climate realists make a compelling case, reminding us that generations to come will have to ‘find the beauty in our burnt planet’ since they deserve beauty too. The balance to be struck is between acknowledging the worst effects and likely future impacts of climate change, and insisting that we continue to resist them – pushing for changes that will save lives, communities and ecosystems. An honest appraisal of how ‘burnt’ things are becoming should not give way to climate nihilism. Letting go of settlements is not the same as ‘giving up’. In Holderness, people have been learning to let go for thousands of years.
In letting go, of course, we salvage what we can from the wreckage, whether altarpieces or stories, and integrate them back into Time’s weave. In Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (2014), the anthropologist Gastón R Gordillo seeks to ‘deglamorise’ ruins by removing them from the pedestal of the heritage industry, ‘where visitors pay to contemplate a relic that they are ordered to photograph but not to touch. These ruins are objects without afterlife: dead things from a dead past.’ The distinction Gordillo makes between the sticky, tangible, everyday material that is ‘rubble’, and fetishised, mummified ‘ruins’, feels pertinent to Holderness – where the gulf between past and present has itself been eroded. Where, in a sense, lost villages, buildings and neighbours are not really lost at all, but persist among us still, returning with the relentless regularity of the tide.
Ulrome, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. Untitled photo by Neil A. White from the series Lost Villages
At the Lighthouse Museum in Withernsea, I met the noted East Yorkshire historian, trainspotter and steampunk Phil Mathison – wearing civvies, rather than the elegant embroidered jacket, top hat, cravat and cane of his author photo. Mathison is the author of The Legendary Lost Town of Ravenser (2015), a settlement that, he argues, was a ‘genuine powerhouse’ in its short lifetime. Ravenser Odd crops up in William Shakespeare’s history plays (as ‘Ravenspurg’) no fewer than eight times. ‘I like people to discover the story, because it was this very powerful town: more powerful than Grimsby or Hull in its day. Yet it only existed for 130 years. There’s something special about the fact it seemed to emerge from nowhere, thrived for more than a century, and then was wiped off the face of the earth.’
Ravenser Odd began life as a sandbank, emerging in the 13th century as the tides changed in the Humber estuary. Its first settler was a resourceful man called Peter Atte See who fashioned a home inside a shipwreck on the beach there. Chancery Inquisition records written at the time note that he ‘received ships and merchants and sold them meat and drink, and afterwards others began to dwell there’. A scattering of canny opportunists soon joined him, curing and selling herring, wool, salt and other provisions, and building their rough shanties on the major trade route to and from Scandinavia, the Low Countries and Germany (even today, the Humber’s ports and wharves handle 14 per cent of the UK’s international trade). Around 1235, local nobles officially recognised Ravenser Odd as a town, and the scrappy new settlement burst into life, winning royal recognition from Edward I and becoming a tax haven, exempt from paying tallage (a land tax), to the dismay of its suffering rival, Grimsby.
Ravenser Odd soon acquired more than 100 houses, a mayor, a court, a chapel, a prison – with gallows – a windmill, and many shops, wharves, tanneries, fish-curing sheds, warehouses and quays, a weekly market and an annual fair. As well as fish and wool, customs accounts mention timber, skins, salt, oil, pitch and wine – even hawks and falcons shipped from Norway. Fortunes were made and, early in the 14th century, the constituency of Ravensrodd sent not one but two MPs to Parliament.
Even while the town burgeoned in wealth, power and influence, Ravenser’s improvised beginnings in Peter Atte See’s shipwreck-home seemed to suffuse the salty rebel spirit of the place. It was never free of controversy, and became known for the sinister piratical practice of ‘forestalling’, where local men would ‘go out with their little boats to ships in the Humber’, as a royal inquiry would later report, intercept incoming vessels bound for Hull or Grimsby, and compel them to dock at Ravenser Odd, by persuasion or by force, seizing their goods or acquiring them at knockdown prices.
Erosion and flooding became common, exposing corpses and skeletons from the town’s graveyard
Both Hull and Grimsby complained to the king. Grimsby’s representatives claimed the men of Ravenser had ‘violently arrested, by various forces, various merchants, foreign as well as native, both in the sea and in the water of the Humber.’ In 1282, King Eric of Norway wrote to King Edward I to protest about a chest of gold and silver coins (and other cargo of a ship cast ashore at Ravenser Odd) that was stolen by townsmen; a few years later, German and Dutch merchants complained of the same, adding that six of their crew had been killed. Accusations of murder, raids and piracy continued to amass. In the royal inquiry that eventually followed, the Crown sided with its favourite pirates (who’d provided ships, arms, men and other resources in its war again the Scots), and dismissed all charges.
In the first half of the 14th century, the sea that birthed this wild little town began to claw it back. Erosion and flooding became common, exposing corpses and skeletons from the town’s graveyard. ‘The inundations of the sea and of the Humber had destroyed to the foundations the chapel of Ravenser Odd,’ wrote the chronicler of Meaux Abbey, Thomas Burton, ‘so that the corpses and bones of the dead there buried horribly appeared.’ The town became more perilous and depopulated, until in 1362 the great storm, the Grote Mandrenke, combined with unusually high tides, produced a surge that swept the final remains of Ravenser Odd back to the sea.
A 1734 map of the Humber river, with nothing remaining of the island of Ravenser Odd. Courtesy the National Archives, Kew, MPE 1/525
Ravenser vanished – but not without trace. We have small insights into its past; biographical details and names of its inhabitants in court rolls and royal inquiries, lovingly collated by Mathison. There’s Robert Rotenherying who carried provisions for the English in the Scottish wars. Matilda La Barbur, murdered in Ravenser in the 1250s. Richard Reedbarowe, a hermit, who petitioned parliament to build a lighthouse on the peninsula. Hugh le Flekmaker, who occupied a plot of land on the king’s soil: like all his neighbours, he’d soon lose it all.
There are no blunt teachable moments in the fate of Ravenser Odd. ‘Don’t construct your medieval pirate utopia on a sandbank’ isn’t useful advice in 2024: but, like so many true stories embellished into legend, it offers a way to understand loss and local pride as intermingled. Our historic forebears can bring a shine, or at least some fascination, to where we call home. Even if we don’t intend it, we cannot help but leave marks anyway, some lying dormant for hundreds of years.
Area known as Shanty Town near Skipsea, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. Untitled photo by Neil A. White from the series Lost Villages
Parsons spun Ravenser Odd into the headlines in 2022, with his submarine, multi-beam sonar explorations of the sea floor around Spurn Point. He began searching for the ‘Yorkshire Atlantis’ precisely because of its lateral connection to the current climate crisis: an expert in sedimentology, he studies the interaction of energy use, climate change and its geophysical consequences. Perhaps Ravenser Odd and Holderness’s lost villages hold the key to addressing contemporary challenges: how do you stop Hull ‘becoming Venice’ as sea levels rise? Will the Humber need a tidal barrier? And how do you involve local people in these conversations, when the answers stretch beyond their lifetimes? Looking back is part of the answer.
Parsons’s team hasn’t found evidence of Ravenser Odd on the sea floor yet, though they continue searching. They are looking for harbour wall foundations – but it is ‘an active marine environment’ and the data is often noisy. Still, says Parsons: ‘We’ve used Ravenser Odd as a historical framing, but also as a future framing, where you shift the time-scales of the discussions, and take people beyond their own lived experiences temporally. And that’s really helpful in engaging their understanding of long-term environmental change, but also the sort of interventions you might decide to make as a community – and how they change when you have a longer lens on the problem.’
Residents of East Yorkshire understood climate adaptation long before anyone else knew of the dangers of anthropogenic climate change. After drastic floods in 1906, more than 1,000 acres of Holderness lay underwater. Withernsea’s impressive lighthouse has the rare distinction of being situated 500 metres inland from the coast – an early exercise in sustainable building practices. When I visited on an autumnal Tuesday, the town’s amusement arcades and parks were quiet, but the cafés and fish and chip shops enjoyed a roaring trade, the smell of fish-frying oil mingling satisfyingly with the brine in the air. There is a lobster port (drawing in £1 million a year; the catch all sold to Spain and Portugal) whose perimeter fence boasts rusting metal slogans: ‘Hard graft and risk’; ‘Beneath the waves, a different world’. Like a lot of British seaside towns, Withernsea contains a disproportionate number of late-middle-aged men who look like off-duty pirates.
At the centre of the promenade are the iconic Pier Head buildings – an imposing entrance, framed by what look like two outsized sandcastles, crenelations and all. It is an entrance that leads nowhere. The brand-new pier was destroyed in the late 19th century during storms that threw a succession of ships at it. But despite a recent spirited campaign, the pier has never been replaced: now as before, the seafront centres on a grandiose gateway to the sea itself. This is a part of a world comfortable with framing absences, of drawing focus to things that once were – and salvaging what it can.
The offices of the local weekly newspaper, The Holderness and Hornsea Gazette (established in 1910 and still holding out against local media decline), are a two-minute walk from the seafront, and – according to another public sign – 800 yards from the submerged St Peter’s church at Owthorne. Sam Hawcroft, editor and co-owner, was born inland, in Hull, but was drawn by Withernsea’s strange allure. ‘It was always an ambition of mine to come out to Holderness,’ she says fondly over a cup of tea: ‘the landscape is so bleak, but in a really beautiful way. It’s flat as anything – probably as close as you can get to the Netherlands. And quiet, but people are so friendly. Withernsea is a bit care-worn, like a lot of slightly deprived seaside towns, but there’s a lot of ambition here too.’
There’s been a church on the site since 1149: now it’s only 500 feet from the cliff edge and in danger of becoming a shipwreck
Wearing a fleece sporting the Gazette logo, Hawcroft bears the unmistakable Yorkshire combination of sincere local pride and highly deadpan humour – a sensibility she also ascribes to the locals’ surprisingly relaxed attitude to their receding coastline. ‘People really are quite laissez-faire about it,’ Hawcroft says. ‘You’ll get outsiders like Adam Farrer moving here [his memoir Cold Fish Soup (2021) describes coming to Withernsea in his teens], screaming: “The town’s falling into the sea!!” And the locals just reply calmly: “Yeah, we know.” I don’t see any urgency around here either, because what can you do about it? You can’t hold back the tide.’ Or large-scale geological change either: previous ice ages forced mass migrations; in that sense, today’s are not the first climate refugees. But this time, it is human activity that’s altering the natural environment, more unpredictably and perilously than before.
Richard Jackson, the coastal change manager for East Riding Council, is a cheerfully pragmatic man, in a job that requires a lot of pragmatism. At one point, as he guided me along the collapsing Holderness coast, we carefully skirted around a breezeblock barrier bearing permanent red signs reading: ‘CLIFF COLLAPSE ROAD CLOSED’ and ‘DANGER: Cliffs subject to coastal erosion. Do not proceed’. It was a sunny afternoon, and two teenage boys were sitting on the wrong side of the barrier with their legs dangling over the edge of the collapsed road. ‘Er, I wouldn’t sit there if I were you lads,’ Jackson said, his concerned tone leading them to move.
At Aldbrough Leisure Park, north of Withernsea, Jackson took me to the cliff’s edge and pulled out an aerial photograph of the caravan park taken in 1966. The original site has more than halved since then, the coast having retreated several hundred feet. ‘Of these 13 houses, there are now six left,’ he said, indicating a cluster on the map; ‘and all of these caravans, all of these houses and this hotel have all gone.’ In the nearby village of Mappleton, which presses right up against the edge of the cliff, All Saints church boasts a distinctive steeple built of stone salvaged from a 19th-century shipwreck. There’s been a church on the site since 1149, but now it’s only 500 feet from the cliff edge and in danger of becoming a shipwreck itself. Google Maps ‘street view’ displays a hefty chunk of cliff that is no longer there; the cliffside public toilets are no longer safe, and are fenced off. More immediately challenging for the local council is that the coastal B1242 road runs so close to the cliff edge that it will soon have to close.
The regional council’s monitoring and community engagement programme takes on any property deemed to be at risk in the next 50 years, providing six-monthly updates on average erosion rates. Some people, stressed to discover their homes are on the list, email Jackson weekly for the latest figures. Once your building crosses the ‘imminent risk’ line (a distance calculated on average annual loss for your stretch of coastline), a legal notice goes out, the owner is compelled to evacuate, and the building is demolished. There is a duty of care to residents, but also to the plausible humans, flora and fauna on the beach below. On their home visits, the Coastal Change team have encountered ignorance and denial about the risks – or sales conducted outside of the land registry, which sidestep legal requirements for surveys – but these cases are relatively rare.
‘One thing we’re really trying to get across to government is that erosion is often seen in terms of numbers – of properties, or square metres of land under threat; but actually there’s a story behind each of those numbers, each of those homes,’ said Jackson, as we wound through country lanes north of Withernsea. The consequences can be overwhelming: ‘What happens to people who lose their home, when there is no budget for any compensation, and it’s a complete loss of capital? If they need to move into council housing, well, there’s not a lot available here – this is a largely rural area. What happens if people have to move away from their jobs, their support networks, or carers? What if they have kids who need to move school? … There’s a whole tangled web of social and health issues that we’re having to deal with.’
The whole time I was in Holderness, I kept thinking of Parsons’s ‘difficult truth’: some of its settlements may be beyond saving. Even if that is the case – here and elsewhere – many other questions follow: who gets to leave on their own terms and find happy homes elsewhere? What, if any, kind of justice and support might they expect, in lieu of compensation from a society for whom climate change must be seen as a collective responsibility? And what should happen to the salvageable remnants of the places to which we must bid farewell? There are no easy answers, but there are worse parts of the world to start looking for inspiration than the East Riding of Yorkshire.
For people who have grown up in Holderness, stoicism is embedded. There is a muscle memory here that acknowledges the precarity of life lived on the cliff edge. People have always understood the shore as a porous border, not a fixed line: a palimpsest of layers, breaches, incursions and inundations; of remnants washed up on the beach or revealed at low tide. Indeed, Holderness contains at least one thriving piece of land that was once uninhabitable. Southwest of Withernsea towards the Humber is Sunk Island, once a genuine island, a sandbank in the estuary like Ravenser Odd. Eventually, further drainage, sand and mud deposits led the channel to silt up entirely in the 18th century, rendering Sunk Island part of the mainland.
This leads to some peculiar statistics, Mathison explained: the landmass reclaimed from the sea at Sunk Island is actually greater than that lost from the Holderness coast over the past 800 years. In aggregate, East Yorkshire has actually gained land. Perhaps there is something karmic in that give and take – an affirmation that the shifting sands and tumbling clay of Holderness are always in flux. As Ravenser Odd proves, bold new settlements can arrive, even while others disappear as the North Sea keeps pummelling away, carrying its deposits south down the coast to Spurn Point and perhaps laying the base for a new Ravenser Odd.
The discovery of a freshwater fish skeleton provided material proof of the lost mere
Ravenser’s buildings were probably made from wood and cobbles, wattle and daub, and held together with clay, which does not leave much in the way of physical remains. Yet in April 2024, an unusual limestone block, with clear carved tool markings, was discovered at Spurn Point. Initial investigations indicate that it is similar in type and age to those used to construct 12th-century churches. Could it have been part of Ravenser’s chapel?
Other historical fragments illuminate the strange history of Holderness, beyond the pirate haven. At low tides, locals have found markers of burial mounds and grave goods, post holes from houses that once stood on stilts, and stumps from petrified forests – even a henge. Human remains, too, have been spat out along the coast by these same unsentimental processes, from church graveyards long ago washed away: where possible, they’ve been reinterred in churches still standing – St Mary’s in Rimswell, All Saints in Easington. At Withernsea’s coastal gardens, the discovery of a freshwater fish skeleton provided material proof of the lost mere (a shallow freshwater lake) that was – some centuries ago – swallowed by the sea.
The relationship with time bends in mysterious and sometimes subversive ways on the East Yorkshire coast, provoking us to reconsider what we think of as valuable as we face up to the realities of climate change. Far from being a ‘poor investment’, some people view buying property on the soft clay cliffs of Holderness as a well-reasoned and pragmatic calculation. Prices are low, and the buyers are often retirees with no dependents to whom to hand on their ‘estate’. They’re happy to see out the rest of their days basking in sea views and the gentle conviviality of the area, unworried about what happens to a cold plot of land 20 years after they’re gone. It is a sincere and knowing embrace of our own impermanence. Watching the North Sea crash tirelessly against this desolately beautiful piece of coastline, it feels like that embrace has a fine reward.