Road closed

Ulrome, East Yorkshire

More about my East Coast/North Sea cycle ride. A major motivation for starting this trip (assuming that it continues through Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and on the Belgium, the Netherlands and beyond...) is that it's a bit of a case of 'last chance to see'. The sea is rising - that's a fact. Large chunks of England are disappearing into it - also a fact. I wanted to find out what impact that was having on the local environment and the local people. Not a 'fact-finding' investigative journalism type thing, just I'm really concerned about climate change and what it's going to do to us.

In the event I was surprised how much coastal erosion came up in conversations, only slightly steered by me. A chatty ranger at the WatersEdge visitor centre at Barton-on-Humber 'got serious' and told me about the sea level rise and that a nature reserve along the estuary had recently nearly been lost. A dog-walker at Donna Nook in Lincolnshire told me all about the local anger at possibly losing some of their fields to make salt-marsh to replace some lost because of the work to save Hull from going underwater. In Tunstall I talked to a woman who explained why Holderness seemed so unspoilt: nobody wanted to build if there was no guarantee that the houses would still be there in 100 years. She saw it as a blessing as well as a curse: it kept the village one of traditional farming families.

If you look at the East Coast, you can see that the Holderness coast (from Flamborough Head to Spurn Head) is scooped, whilst the Lincolnshire coast is bulging. That's very simply because the way the sea moves means that the Holderness coast is washed down and lands on Lincolnshire.

It's a complicated area, and there are not the easy answers that some people hope for. The old-fashioned groynes are not being replaced, not just because of money. They didn't work, or if they did locally, somewhere down the coast suffered. Below are some of the photos I took of the most striking impacts of the dynamic coast. They are shown south to north, following my route in some lovely weather in late September.

Below: Easington Beach. The ruined structures out in the sea are World War II defences. Given that they were built about 65 years ago, this demonstrates well how fast the erosion is.

South of Withernsea: you can see the town's lighthouse in the background. The cliff are low, soft clay and the eroded gouges are obvious. The rough grassland in the foreground was prime farmland until a few years ago. Behind me was a row of houses, their sea view closer each year. A team of surveyors were setting up equipment to assess the situation.

This was until a couple of years ago a coastal road, a useful short-cut for residents of Tunstall. A storm undermined the road and the surfacing was removed in case it fell onto people on the beach below. A villager assured me that it was still safe to use: I pushed my bike very carefully as far away from the edge as I could!

Another destroyed coastal lane, this time at Ulrome. In one day's cycle ride I found three such lanes which were on my (new) map but no longer on the Holderness coast. Here I talked to a family who came here regularly. Even they were shocked by how much of the road had gone since their last visit - three months ago.

Below is looking the other way. The owners of the gardens had to have notices asking people not to walk through them. They will have much more to worry about soon: these gardens cannot last much longer, and some people may have to pay to heve their houses deolished before they fall into the sea, to prevent the sort of sight as above.

Below is at what should have been the other end of the Ulrome road. I get the impression that these works are being done by the caravan site owner, for obvious reasons, but I would not fancy staying here.