Wild at Hull: Walking the Humber. Stage 3. Brough Haven to Hessle Haven

Monday 29 January 2018

Walking the Humber. Stage 3. Brough Haven to Hessle Haven

I get the 8:03 train to Brough. It's cloudy and mild. In Brough Haven, a westerly wind blows the drizzle onto my back. A Grey Heron hunts by the shoreline on the ebbing tide. There are four Shelduck and many Teal and Mallard.

A Kestrel hunts over the grassy, muddy floodbank peppered with molehills. A bit later, a Marsh Harrier lets itself be carried east by the wind. I am walking by the disused Brough Aerodrome, the Wolds in the horizon. Curlew feed on the grassy airfield. From Brough Haven there is a long stretch of reedbed and mudflats occasionally interrupted by creeks where birds gather to wash. In one of these creeks, Elloughton Clough, a Cetti's Warbler, my first of the year sings its explosive phrase from the reeds. A Skylark sings too.

There is not much on the Welton Waters fish complex or on the sports lake. The only thing of note is a spit on the mudflats called Oyster Ness. I can't imagine oysters growing here now. Opposite I can see South Ferriby and Read Island, and sand banks on the Humber.
At the end of Welton Waters, I get to an area where the footpath is on the muddy saltmarsh by an industrial estate. I checked the tide times to make sure I could cross it and it is almost low tide. Despite the rain, the mud is quite firm and I can bridge this gap in the path with no issues. Just as I am rejoining the path on the bank I flush a Green Woodpecker, which flies to an Alder. Later I hear it whinnying.
There is an area of brownfield where an old tile and brickyard and a mill were sited which is now greening. In it, there is a marshy area with reeds, and clumps of old trees in the corners. I make a stop for a snack on a small copse with pine trees by Brickyard Lane.
I decide to walk on the beach by the base of the cliff, the so called Redcliff, to have a good look at it (top shot). At its highest it is just over 10 m high. It is made of a juxtaposition of laminated sediments and glacial till indicating the existence of a moraine west of the Wolds, where the North Atlantic ice sheet pushed into the Humber Gap, a narrow opening between the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire wolds during the Last Glacial Maximum (about 20,000 years ago). At the time, an ice sheet of over 300 m high covered the Holderness and the area where Hull stands now, up to the Wolds. A glacial lake, Lake Humber, sat east of the Wolds, sandwiched between the North Sea and the the vale of York ice sheets. It is a pleasant walk at the base of Redcliff, mostly sandy underfoot with small pebbles and stones of various colours and sizes. As I approach Long Plantation, the recent erosion is evident with a few large trees collapsed onto the beach.
It is at Long plantation that I meet the Yorkshire Wolds Way, as it climbs through the wood towards Melton.

I had planned to take the train back at North Ferriby, but it is early and the Humber Bridge looks within easy reach, so I press on. The beach by Ferriby is slightly muddy, but quite pebbly and the tide is still very low. I climb the steps onto the floodbank and on Reed Pond there is a female Goldeneye.

Just outside North Ferriby there is a monument to the Ferriby Boats. In September 1937, brothers Ted and Bill Wright, amateur archaeologists, found a wooden plank sticking out of the mud by North Ferriby and realised it was part of an ancient boat, exposed due to the erosion in this part of the Humber. They they painstakingly dug it out from the sticky mud at low tide. In the following decades they found and excavated two more boats. These large, 15 m long boats were well preserved Bronze Age planked boats which have been carbon dated to 1700 to 2000 BC. These boats are of international importance, as their craftsmanship was not thought to have been used until Roman times. The area around Ferriby must have had a settlement and might have offer rare opportunities to cross the estuary as the only high ground for miles, as to the East, carr and marshy ground would have prevented or made difficult to land and transport cargo to the north of the estuary. Despite the abundance of jetties in old maps of the area, little remains of them, just a few post sticking out of the mud. There is a scarcity of boats, I see none during the trip today other than those at Brough Haven. Maybe the Ferriby boats were the first Humber ferry?

The stretch to the Humber Bridge runs parallel to the train line and the path is quite smooth, on a raised bank with large boulders by the estuary. The tide is roaring in now, covering the mudflats. The Humber Bridge looms imposing. The sky clears somewhat and there are some dry spells. I stop for a light lunch at the Country Park restaurant and walk under the bridge to Hessle Haven before taking the train back. The walk is 12 km.

Featured species: Cetti’s warbler

Another reed loving species that has become a success story. The Cetti's Warbler has steadily colonised the UK, with the first record in 1961. This small, skulking warbler, noted by its loud, explosive song, colonised Kent in 1972 and since it has spread north steadily, only slowed by harsh winters. It first bred north of the Humber in 2006.
More information
Wright, E. 1990. The Ferriby Boats. Seacraft from the Bronze Age. Routledge.
Bateman, Mark D., David JA Evans, David H. Roberts, Alicia Medialdea, Jeremy Ely, and Chris D. Clark. 2018. The timing and consequences of the blockage of the Humber Gap by the last British− Irish Ice Sheet. Boreas 47: 41-61.