Rob

I knew Peter Ives [Matt’s maternal Grandfather]. He was our spray man at John Burton’s, for Ryehill.

Matt

When I was taking to Pam and Paul a few weeks ago, Paul had sort of said to me ‘your Grandad – he’d do anything if the bosses asked him’ and there was a point where chemical spraying came in, and a lot of them said ‘no – I’m not touching it’, but Grandad apparently said that of course he would. Then, talking to my Mum about this, she said that she would see him come home with yellow powder and stains covering his workwear. My Nanna used to take that workwear and scrub it with her bare hands. And so… he ended up with brain cancer – she ended up with Parkinson’s – similarly, that kind of thing around spraying and carcinogens…

Sara

He wouldn’t wear his mask down at the farm. Paul used to tell him to get his mask on and Gordon Blythe did before him.

R

But going back to Pete’s day though they wouldn’t have worn masks. There were no regulations. A lot of fertilisers they used then were certain types of organophosphates. I remember even in my lifetime they were still being used. You either wore your masks around your forehead or tucked under your chin. And they’d fill up with all of that muck and then you’d put them back on again.

M

Wow. I mean when I was young I remember him losing his memory and all of the horrible stuff that happens, and then later with my Nanna saw those similar processes again, and recently came to looking at the landscape and thinking about the erosion of the coast here, and the erosion of people’s memories. There’s maybe something there about him churning the land over you know, lands being lost, these conditions are affecting farming communities still and worsening – outside of this little stretch as well – and I’m interested in that.

R

Yes I think you’re right and eventually all of the people that know this stuff will be gone and this will be hearsay, won’t it? And until then often it’s only half a story. In this week’s gazette there’s a story about a Lancaster bomber, on it’s way back from training, the Germans coming across to Hull – a group of fighters broke off, and there are three or four different versions of whereabouts the bomber was shot down. All the way from Withernsea across to Rimswell, and eventually they found a report from the people who were manning the turrets at Stone Creek, that it eventually went down in the Humber. And all it was, was that someone at Rimswell was at a dance and had written down how they remembered seeing it come over being followed by the fighter. Over time, the stories get diluted.

M

And the shape of that path as well – on the ground – that you can see being chopped away and eaten away, it’s pretty fierce now and even in the past 5 or 6 years the cliffs are just being torn away at. And it goes back so much further than that though doesn’t it? I’ve started to read a bit about drainage and the relationship between water coming in from the Humber and down from North Holderness, shifting the silt down and building those little islands that become barriers – and you know a lot about what drainage is and means exactly in Holderness, and how this in relation to the shape of the coast impacts farmland that I’m still trying to understand…

R

So, South-east Holderness, where we are now – half of it, maybe a little bit more than half, is at sea level, or ever so slightly just above it. And the problem we are having is that Stone Creek is one of the main outlets – it’s the lowest outlet of the lot – it drains Keyingham drain, which drains Keyingham Marsh and a bit of Ottringham Marsh, and if you go right back it takes water from Burstwick, back through Roos, to Tunstall – naturally, that’s where it comes through.

So the Humber is silting up, and because Stone Creek is the lowest outlet, it’s suffering the worst because water just can’t get away. At low tide, if there’s a trickle at Stone Creek and into the Humber, there is till 8 or 10 feet of water in Keyingham drain. And because of legislation, it can’t be desilted because the European law is that silt cannot be lifted out of the water. A way of doing this is to come in with a barge that has, basically something that’s like a big egg whisk, that just whisks it up into a slurry, sucks it up – pipes are then laid out into the Humber in the hopes that the water will take it away. But it doesn’t quite, and obviously they can only work on a low tide, and if the tides coming back in then they have to stop. And it brings half of what they’ve just taken out straight back in.

If you ever go down to Stone Creek at low tide, if you stand on the bridge you will see what I mean. It goes out through the boats – there’s a trickle about as wide as this table when it’s real low tide, and if you look out into the Humber you’ll see that the mudflats have grass on them now. Because there is that much silt there. All the work they are doing out at the docks – they’re doing the same there, desilting their jettys so that they can get the big tankers in now, but they don’t tip it out at that end, near the Humber Bridge, because all it does is wash straight back down.  

M

What do you reckon the consequences of that are going to be?

R

Well eventually, what they’re going to have to do is force drain - put some big pumps in at Stone Creek that will suck the water out of the drain and just pump it back into the Humber, similar to what we have at Winestead. A lot of Withernsea town water comes down into Winestead, and it puts houses at risk. At Keyingham drain, there’s not a single house at risk – it’s all farmland. Which is… in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter.

M

So when farmland floods here, that’s going to get soaked up?

R

Well, it will if the drain is empty enough. The water table will match what’s in the drain… Keyingham Drain, back in the 1800s – I think there’s a date on the side of the clew, maybe 1880 – they diverted a lot of water and put a new Stone Creek in – what we now call Stone Creek, it moved - a massive undertaking back then, all by hand, and they moved it back so that it drained Burton Pidsea Carrs, and it’s slowly building up to revert back again to marsh. There’s a massive acreage of land in there. So the farmers are building banks alongside the drain, so that the drain can still come up, but they’re making their own drainage systems the other side of it. Just protecting themselves. What they’ve essentially done is cut all of their dykes off from the main drain, and put their own pumps in, so they’re making their own dykes which are draining the fields straight into the drain. If ever this bank went it would just flood all of the fields.

M

To me it feels as if there are endless cycles at work here, but through those cycles people need to be able to make it through and to work, and farm – you need to be able to live that life.

R

Fifty years ago, when Burton Carrs was as nearly at wet as it is now, it would be grassland because a lot of people would have had cattle so it wouldn’t matter, but now cattle is going, and we need more corn to grow… Along the banks of the Humber, every farm had grazing rights, right out to the low water level. All that’s stopped now because the water level is rising, the lands too soft now. And – it’s just covered in rubbish.

What’s happening back here on Humber Lane – is that there are no EU subsidies for maintaining the original bank, but there are EU subsidies there to take it down, and build a new one further back, and let the land in-between flood and become wetland habitat.

The ironic thing about it all is that, what we’re doing down here – the setback – is that we move the bank back, dig it a bit deeper in places to make it hold water, and then take the old bank away, so that the tide comes in, but the thing is that’s exactly what they did in reverse to reclaim it.

M

Paul the other day was describing how he feels like if you promote isolated patches of wetland, you end up pushing natural or settled patterns around so much that it can’t ever be anything but a sort of manufactured patchwork with consequences that become ever more difficult to manage and work with.

R

In these fields out here, we never had geese grazing corn. This year has been the first ever year. And it’s because they’ve moved everything half a mile back. They will live on the mudflats during the day, and at night they come over to graze when it’s safe for them.

We’ll stop work on a dinnertime now and It’s not unusual to see a Kingfisher come and sit on your digger bucket. All of the wildlife around Holderness… it’s all there. The difference is that people don’t see it anymore, because we ride around in the car and never get out and walk around.

S

Do you think that in Medieval times, this was a very marshy area? If I’m going back 600, 700 years, that – yes, it was farmed? Did people move out in the winter and came and farmed it in the summer?

R

Yes – well, all of the farms at one side, on higher ground, would have had summer grazing. One of the sites they found covered in oyster shells, one of the Roman settlements, is just out here behind us. It was half in the next field to ours but came into ours.

S

Well that was only 18 inches down, that settlement. I remember Gordon Blythe came to our house and said ‘somebody’s put some rubbish in that field, I’m bringing up all sorts of stuff’ – it was mostly oyster shells. They ate oysters out the Humber.

R

We put some drains in the corner of his field last spring, and we went through it – you can see it’s the same soil. It’s black.

S

It was the Parisi that were here, and they were apparently quite peace loving – they weren’t a violent tribe. Brough was the first place of any size than ran up from Lincoln – there wasn’t a lot happening between here north of the river and York, and Chester, which were military garrisons.

There is Burstall Priory at Skeffling as well – I read recently how, we know it was a priory and there were monks living there, however it was a cover for trading with the wool industry in the Netherlands when we weren’t supposed to be doing so. And basically it had warehouses for wool from the West Riding – of course it went over to the Netherlands and it was brought back as cloth to make garments. It could just be speculation.

Let me show you my literary prowess! Geoffrey Chaucer – The Summoner’s Tale – he travelled on the continent, we know that, but he only came about as far north here as Oxford, but this tale takes place in Holderness. ‘… there is in Yorkshire as, I guess, a marshy place called Holderness’. They knew, in London, that this was a marsh. I imagine this place as having been a bit like the Fens, and in how difficult it’s been to cultivate. Vermuyden came over from the Netherlands to drain the river as well later on…

R

Mastenbroek – the company we deal with as well are based in Holland. In Holland, it’s a legal requirement to leave access – about 6 metres down every water course, for maintenance. They’ve got it right. We haven’t. The difference is the most of Holland is below sea level whereas we’re borderline sea level. I mean before the Ice Age of course we were joined weren’t we. There are still trees on the seabed off Withernsea coast and it’s still common for the fishermen to be bringing up mammoth’s teeth and bits like that. And that’s why Holderness is flat – because an ice sheet essentially came through – and the bottom of the ice sheet is Keyingham drain.

When Whittaker opened up the new sand and gravel pit at the other side of the road at Berrygate Nurseries, he had to do test boards to prove how much sand and gravel there was. And when the specialists came, they said that there was something wrong, because they were finding shells that shouldn’t be here. I said ‘what do you mean?’ and they said that they had got shells out of the pit that were native to the Caribbean. You only find them in tropical lands. And so then they decided that Holderness, back in prehistoric times was possibly at times tropical, and the gravel layer is where the ice sheet came through, pushing everything to the sides, and the sand and the gravel is either side of it, and Holderness is flat and hard because it was compressed.

M

I love that and I didn’t know that – it makes sense because the fossils we find around here are glacial erratics, right – they’re essentially mismatched –

R

Because they’ve been brought over with that ice sheet from further North.

A lump of this glacier broke off at Roos, and settled, and I think just as it thawed it left a bog – people come from all over the world to this bog at Roos, to sample it for example, because it’s like a time capsule.

They reckon that at Garton and Grimston… that so far back under there it’s chalk – the same chalk as at Flamborough. When sea water hits chalk, it swells, and that might be why at Flamborough in that direction it rises. They reckon that eventually maybe when it finds its way back and hits the chalk here again, it will start lifting the cliffs again.

M

And these are markers for consequences of rapid and catastrophic sea-level rise in the not-so-distant past…

R

And, sort of like what they’re doing down the road at Mappleton, and at Withernsea, they’ve put huge stone defences in there… Easington have them, and they reckon eventually because of it being the gas site they’re obviously going to keep protecting it, but it could potentially in years from now be cut off completely. It’ll only go quicker because the cliffs go up to the sea – the land climbs to the sea, so as it works it’s way back there is less and less land.

M

In North Holderness you can really see that – driving the coast road from where we are up there it’s undeniable. And even up there at Mappleton, there’s so much sand there now – ten years ago to me it felt really different. So I guess at Withernsea – the millions of pounds worth of Norwegian boulders that were installed there a couple of years ago – the same will happen actually.

S

How deep is it at Dogger Bank?

R

We had a talk at Young Farmers from North Sea Ferries, and they reckon that if a ferry ever sank, anywhere between setting off and getting to Holland, as long as it sort of sank straight, it would never be entirely underwater. I mean, that wouldn’t ever happen but if it did the deck would still be above water. They reckon the deepest area between leaving the terminal at Hull and getting to Rotterdam, is just near Spurn.