Blashill : Changes in Spurn Point. 



267 



proportion of river water to the sea water running" out at the ebb 

 tides is now very much gTeater than it was when Ravenser Odd 

 was founded. If this difference is great enough to have any 

 effect the current outward ought now to be stronger and to run 

 longer in proportion to the current inward. The Point of Spurn 

 may therefore now be directed further to seaward and may be 

 outside the site of Ravenser Odd and the Old Den. But this is 

 not confirmed by the latest Admiralty chart, which shows small 

 portions inside and outside the Point covered with only one foot 

 of water at ordinary low tides, so that the site of the lost town 

 may as well be outside, where one would expect to find it, as 

 within the Point. 



Another suggestion which I make with some hesitation, may 

 be worth considering. Before the end of the fourteenth century 

 every vestige of Ravenser Odd had disappeared. In 1399 

 Henry IV. landed at ' Ravenser Spurn,' where a new spit of 

 shingle must certainly have begun to jut out. When in 147 1 

 Edward IV. landed at the same place the spit would have made 

 considerable progress, and a deep water channel must have 

 formed behind it, otherwise the place presented no greater 

 facilities for his landing than many parts of the Holderness 

 coast nearer to York. Holinshead says that Edward landed 

 ' within the Humber on the Holderness side, even in the same 

 place where Henrie, Erie of Derby, after called King Henrie the 

 Fourth, landed.' From 1399 to this present time there has elapsed 

 a period of over 500 years, much more than sufficient for the 

 formation of a bank of shingle of the present length. No doubt 

 the formation of this bank, depending on storms and currents 

 and a varying supply of shingle from the cliffs, must have been 

 very irregular, and the long neck must at times have been over- 

 flowed and been reinforced. Smeaton said that the Point had 

 advanced 280 yards from 1766 to 1771, a rate of about a mile in 

 thirty years. Shelford'-'^ says that for 200 years the Point has 

 extended 2,700 yards, a rate of i^iV^ yards per annum. Lord 

 Avebury, in his ' Scenery of England,' says that, from old maps 

 and records the Spurn must have been entirely formed within 

 the last 300 years. In 1622 Callisf said ' Of late years parcel of 

 the Spurn Head, in Yorkshire, which before did adhere to the 

 Continent, was torn therefrom by the sea, and is now in the 

 nature of an island.' In 1676 Justinian Angell got a patent 

 to put up lights because a broad long sand had been thrown up 



* ' Transactions of Civil Engineers,' Vol. 28. 



+ ' Lectures on Sewers, Grays Inn.' 



1904 September i. 



