Yorkshire: Barmston to Aldbrough 21/6/2007

 

Passing the shacks near Skipsea   Hornsea café   Aldbrough beach

We parked at the end of Barmston village where a footpath went to the coast.  It was high tide and the waves were coming right up to the cliffs in many places, so it was fortunate there was a path along the top of the cliff to the caravan site at Ulrome Sands.  We took the road along the coast to the next site; being perilously close to the edge from erosion it was now closed to traffic.  From this road we regained the cliff-top path, although it was eroded away in places and we had to walk carefully.  Here there was the only interesting plant of the day – bloody cranesbill: one plant right on the cliff edge and obviously due to plunge down with it at any moment and become extinct!  We passed a line of old caravans and decrepit shacks that was completely isolated from everywhere else, accessible only by a rough track from Skipsea.  At the end was a greenhouse and garden area where residents seemed to be growing their own food.  We only glimpsed a single person, who vanished behind the greenhouse.  We continued to the next caravan site and here there was a rare way down to the beach where a stream cut through and the cliff had collapsed.  By now the tide was going out and we could walk along the beach, mostly of sand with pebbles of chalk and other rocks, below red cliffs of sandy clay from which many lumps of clay had fallen to their base, while sections of cliff-top turf had also fallen half-way down.  The whole day was based on the theme of erosion with roads going all the way to the cliff-edge and abruptly disappearing into thin air, and caravans and houses perilously close.  A fisherman we met later said that the land was losing 1.6m a year along here.  At various places we could see derelict buildings overhanging the edge.  We walked along the beach quite comfortably except for one point where waves were still just reaching the cliff, but we were able to round this by means of good timing and reached a widening beach approaching the little seaside town of Hornsea.  Along the promenade we found a café doing simple food and coffee sufficient for lunch.  The weather was still dry and largely sunny, with a cool breeze bringing increasingly dark clouds from the SW.  We continued along the promenade of this quiet resort to where the road turned inland.  We climbed down to the top of the beach over collapsed concrete sea-defences and rubble to continue along sands still getting wider all the time with the tide, although they were usually running with a thin film of water seeping from the land.  We now entered an MoD training range for shelling practice that extended out to sea.  At the little village of Mappleton (a church, a garage, a windmill and little else) there was a ramp up from the beach, but there was plenty of time left so we decided to plough on towards the next village of Aldbrough, passing beneath the crumbling remnants of the deserted village of Great Cowden, but at Aldbrough there was no way up.  We saw a large boulder of clay fall down the cliff just ahead of us.  We scrambled up the muddy collapsed cliff at one of its lowest points, but at the top there was only rough grassland with many pits and hollows and quite impassable – the cliff-top path had long vanished over the edge.  We therefore had to walk several miles back to Mappleton, past an artillery shell still lying on the sand, broken pill-boxes, a washed-up dead guillemot and storm-stranded straight-nosed pipefishes, to gain a road where a taxi from Hornsea could arrive to collect us.  The weather had been hot and sunny, but we could see awesome thunder-storms gathering to the west, where, we learned later, there had been tremendous downpours.