In Holderness

 

A few days ago I tooted a link about ghostly goings on in Holderness, the wild windswept flatlands to the east of Hull in England.

At the time of my toot, I was interested in the fact that  Martinmas coincided with the time around Halloween, and that many of the features of traditional Martinmas celebrations in Germany – turnip lanterns for one – are the same as I remember as part of Halloween, when I was a child on the east coast Scotland, and before Halloween became the homogenised Americanised thing it is today.

Today, Martinmas is celebrated on 11 November, which is of course Remembrance day, something that seems strangely appropriate with its associations with the dead and with ghostly goings on.

Not the cartoon ghosts going ‘woo-woo’, but ghosts as the Romans understood them, those who had died an unquiet death and still walked the earth.

Holderness is itself a strange lonely place, and somewhere I vaguely know.

When I was doing research at Hull University in the very early nineteen eighties, I would sometimes ride my bicycle east from the city to a landscape of windswept fields running down to small coastal villages and old medieval churches hidden away in country lanes and the ruins of abandoned monasteries, left behind after the English Reformation.

At other times, I would get a bus to somewhere on the coast (at that time country buses were still cheap and plentiful, even on a Sunday) and walk along the cliff top path to somewhere else before catching the bus back to Hull.

Marvellous for clearing the mind.

Later on when we lived in York, we would tend to drive to Flamborough and Whitby rather than Holderness for our coast walks, but sometimes we would drive south towards Withernsea, notable for having a lighthouse in the middle of the town – not as daft as it sounds, at the time the lighthouse was built it was surrounded by sand dunes, and the lighthouse was built set back from the coast to protect it from the risk of erosion.

Later, the development of tourism meant that the town crept east to the new promenade, with its railings strangely reminiscent in design of those used at Bondi Beach, leaving the lighthouse in the middle of the town.

Withernsea Lighthouse - geograph.co.uk via wikimedia commons

The other thing, and the reason why we would make the detour to Withernsea was that Withernsea had an excellent fish and chip shop which then, twenty five years ago, bizarrely had a NSW Maritime Services fish identification chart on the wall.

In winter, when the clouds scudded and the wind blew it was a wild and atmospheric place, somehow still strangely isolated