Yesterday's short pedal back to the campsite down a single track road got us thinking that they might be a better option than the cycle trail. As well as being well surfaced and less puddly you also could see more. Though the trail wandered through some lovely countryside cuttings and high hedges screened the view. We consulted the map, Mappleton looked to be the nearest beach to the campsite. A narrow lane from the nearby village of Great Hatfield would take us straight there, about four miles, a perfect distance for a gentle pedal.
The stretch of coastline south of Flamborough Head to Spurn Point is known as Holderness, guidebooks talk of its similarity to Holland, what struck us was a resemblance to Southwest Denmark. The barely undulating landscape of big cloud-shadowed cornfields dotted with cosy looking farms reminded us of cycling between Tönder and Ribe two years ago. Apart from the occasional farmer's Hilux we had the roads to ourselves. It was great.
As for Mappleton itself, the place is scarcely bigger than a hamlet, its most notable feature appeared to be a large SangYong dealership, quite why it was here stuck in the middle of nowhere is inexplicable.
The beach lies beyond a line of low mud-brown cliffs, a short steep track led down past an alarming sign warning of unexploded ordnance.
The entire east coast was highly fortified during WW2, most of the remains have gone now. The Northumbrian beaches of my childhood however were full of hazards, crumbling concrete tank traps, buried rusting barbed wire and machine gun emplacements - my parents called them 'pill-boxes', because of their hexagonal shape I suppose. I doubt that there is much danger of being blown up now after 80 years.
I sat down on rock and stared at the sea. I love the sea, perhaps it's my favourite thing. Hereabouts is a good spot for mindless staring - a broad sweeping shoreline stretching past Hornsea towards Bridlington to the north, southwards to Spurn Head lighthouse. Far out to sea, barely discernible through the mist, a phalanx of giant wind turbines rotated slowly, it was mesmerising. Much has been written over recent months about the importance of mindfulness as a means of getting us through these strange times; maybe, but succumbing to mindlessness, the joy of doing bugger all, has its benefits too.
After a while I realised Gill was nowhere to be seen. Then I spotted her staring intently at a clay cliff face. I wandered across. "This is amazing," she asserted.
It was unusual I had to agree. The cliff face had the consistency of semi-set putty, mostly brownish, but with grey strata above, some of the surface was so soft you could leave a thumb print. Stones and pebbles of differing shapes and types were scattered amongst the clay, sticking out of the cliff's surface and peppering the small boulders piled up at its foot, bits of sandstone, limestone shards and spiky flint, a lump of coal. "This has got to be glacial deposition," I ventured unconfidently. I'm not on home turf so far as geology is concerned, but years of listening to Gill figuring out the story of the lump rock in front of her must have rubbed off, it turned out I was correct.
We thought about having lunch at the Old Post Office Café beside the car park, but we'd had a late breakfast so sat down on a bench seat opposite and stared at our phones. The signal at the campsite is pathetic so we have been incommunicado for a couple of days. A waft of 4g enabled us to find more information about what we had just seen, a fairly detailed article by a local geological society about the development of the cliffs. The clay strata had been laid down in stages due to intermittent glacial periods over the last million years. However, what we see now is more recent in geological terms. The last ice age came to an end about 10,000 years ago.
The map of western Europe would have looked very different, The Thames and Rhine shared a big estuary, The southern half of the North Sea was a low plain - Doggerland, joining Britain to the continent. The coastline of Holderness then was many miles further out, today's cliffs would have been low, undulating hills. Then a combination of rising sea level caused by the ice melt and the sea bed tilting and buckling as the weight of ice diminished and caused a gravitational 'bounce' created what we see today.
Tidal forces continue the process, as the cliffs recede at almost two metres per year they reveal the lives of our ancestors. Mixed up in the clay, beaver pelts used as blankets in the Bronze age, hefty beams from Neolithic huts or medieval barns appear from time to time as well as unexploded mines from more recent history. There's a lot to see in this apparently empty landscape, we our not the only people whose lives have been shaped by climate change, Sea levels rose and inundated Doggerland, its inhabitants migrated. We are not exceptional. What a unexpectedly fabulous day we've had, how nowhere in particular can turn out to be intriguing; you don't have to go very far at all to travel.
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