SPURN. KILNSEA. 121 



could not be preserved when the waste of the coast had brought 

 the violence of the sea upon it, perhaps over the bank of pebbles 

 by which it was connected to the main land. 



Spurn Head, the northern limit of Humber, the south-eastern 

 point of Yorkshire, is a mass of pebbles and sand, moveable by 

 wind and tide ; yet so balanced are the forces by which it is as- 

 sailed from the river and the sea, that this has long supported 

 Smeaton's lighthouses, and is one of the least unstable parts of 

 this variable line of coast. It is not, properly speaking, a part 

 of the old land ; but a long curved bank, thrown up by the sea, 

 on the place of a tract of land which has been destroyed. It is 

 subject to continual waste by the action of the currents setting 

 along the shore southward ; but this waste is continually re- 

 paired by new materials which these currents bring from the 

 cliffs which undergo destruction farther north. It is out of the 

 ruin of Holderness that the Spurn is constituted and main- 

 tained. 



Proceeding northward by a narrow natural causeway of sand 

 and pebbles, slightly connected by the growth of Elymus arena- 

 rius, and sometimes overflowed by the sea, we arrive at the 

 place where Kilnsea was. Here stood a cross, which had been 

 first erected (it was said) at Ravenspurn to commemorate the 

 landing of Henry IV. in 1399, but in 1818 the wandering relic 

 was removed to Burton Constable, and in 1832 was re-erected 

 at Heddon. Kilnsea has shared the fate of Eavenspurn. The 

 broad lands which intervened between the church and the sea, 

 and perhaps constituted a rival to Dimlington Height, have long 

 vanished ; half the church fell in 1826, ten years later the village 

 was removed, and at no distant date the whole of this little hill 

 of hard land will disappear. Destruction of land, once fertile 

 and populous, is the melancholy characteristic of the whole coast 

 from Spurn northward to Bridlington. Through all the reach 

 of history, and probably for longer periods before, the sea has 

 here been gaining on the land. The rate at which the cliffs 

 recede from the insatiable waves has been measured of late 



