Day 113 – Kilnsea to Sunk Island

Sharing rooms doesn’t appear to have unduly affected sleep patterns (at least not that anyone’s admitting) and we’re at our breakfast table by 8:30 in the hope that food may appear earlier than the appointed time. Our hopes are realised. A cooked breakfast without beans (good) but also without sausage (not so good) is served promptly, and we’re ready to get under way at 9:05 with Ben’s achilles having benefited (he hopes) from a combination of overnight pill taking and cream application. Our destination today is a caravan park about 14 miles away on a road just beyond Sunk Island. This is one of the few spots in the area which is easily identifiable for our cab pick up which we arranged yesterday for 3 p.m. subject to the caveat that if we make sufficiently good progress we’ll phone the driver and meet him at a telephone box a couple of miles further up the road. For now, with high tide on the Humber, we set off along the road outside the Crown & Anchor and, after a few hundred yards, turn left over a field to reach a raised embankment which runs parallel to the estuary and which marks the start of an area called Kilnsea Wetlands. The route ahead looks promising and a twitcher arriving at the other end of the wetlands confirms that it should take us all the way to Sunk Island. However, when we enter another area called Weeton Saltmarsh, we can see a number of water filled ditches with no immediately apparent crossing points to keep us on course. A couple of men working on the embankment reckon that we should be able to cross what looks to be the most problematic ditch at a pumping station but, beyond that, there are apparently gaps in the estuary path so we’ll need to go inland to get round them. But crossing at the pumping station presents the first difficulty because, whilst the high gate behind the station which leads onto the crossing can be opened, the equally high gate at the other end is padlocked. We can’t climb over it, but Mike notices that the vertical bars don’t touch the ground, so we might be able to edge our way underneath them. Mike’s first attempt, on his front, doesn’t work but John then tries by sliding flat on his back and gets through. The same technique is successfully adopted by the rest of us – helped by the fact that someone who has clearly done this before has managed to bend one of the bars slightly upwards to create a bit more room. Buoyed by this first time method of overcoming an obstacle on the walk, our attentions turn to which inland route now to take. The closest route is along another raised embankment back towards the Humber, but there’s no guarantee that this will rejoin the estuary beyond all the gaps in the path which we’ve been told about. The most reliable route is along a series of roads, but these start further away from the pumping station and are far less direct (and coastally pure) than the embankment route. We’ve so far walked 6 miles in around 2 hours, so we decide to go along the embankment on the basis that, if there are any problems, they should emerge in time for us to walk back and go along the roads. As it transpires, there are no problems. It takes around half an hour to rejoin the estuary (crossing back to the west of the meridian en route) and, from what we can then see, the way ahead looks continuous and unimpeded. Despite this, during the next 90 minutes or so, we note possible bale out points as we pass them, just in case we do need to retrace our steps. This may have something to do with the name of our destination, Sunk Island, not being wholly confidence inspiring. But the path takes us all the way to the area containing, we anticipate, the bramble patches which were mentioned to John last night. A track leads away from the estuary which we decide it would be prudent to take. This brings us to Stone Creek Farm on a road which meanders back towards the estuary and to the “caravan park” which is, in fact, a house with space outside for several caravans. Just before this, we bump into the bloke to whom John spoke in the Crown & Anchor bar. He’s with a couple of others doing some bird watching and photography over towards the estuary. We stop for a bit of a chat about, among other things, how a closure of the path (mentioned on a Council notice by the side of the road) will affect our next walk and, by the time we resume today’s, it’s about 2:30. We’re not going to reach the telephone box in the next 30 minutes, but equally there’s nothing to keep us at the so called caravan park. We therefore phone the cab driver and arrange for him to pick us up wherever he sees us on the road between the two points. This may give us the time to break through the 15 mile barrier for the day, but the driver gets to us at 2:45 when we’re opposite Sands Farm and have completed a mere 14.6 miles. We don’t suggest that he follows us for the next 700 yards but instead climb into the cab and we’re back at Hull station around 3:20. Gary is spending a couple of days in Hull with Sally and, conveniently, her train from London (delayed) pulls in a couple of minutes after our arrival. Five of us therefore repair to the bar of the Royal Hull Hotel on the station concourse where a wedding party is partaking of a few drinks before being summoned to the wedding breakfast – a concept which, in the middle of the afternoon, causes John a perhaps unwarranted degree of confusion. As for our party, we have one round of drinks before Mike’s departure on his train to York just after 4 o’clock, and another before the departure of Ben’s and John’s train half an hour later.

Day 112 – Withernsea to Kilnsea (via Spurn Head)

Some works which are being carried out by Network Rail near Derby have put the mockers on John’s customary outbound travel timetable. He therefore stays in London on the eve of the walk and then catches an early morning train with Ben and Gary from King’s Cross to Hull. This arrives shortly after 10 o’clock – only a few minutes later than Mike’s train from York – and our cab driver from the previous trip has us back in Withernsea just before 11. Consistent with comments on many earlier walks, it is necessary to bang on about our good fortune as regards weather and tides. After two or three weeks of pretty foul weather, to include Storm Ali 7 days ago, we today have late September sun and clear skies overhead. And with our arrival being 3 hours after high tide, we have the availability of a beach underfoot and the prospect of being able, later in the day, to walk out to and back from Spurn Point without getting our feet wet. So our first 9 miles are spent on firm East Yorkshire sand, with little to break the view of sea and sky apart from an off-shore wind farm and, on the low cliffs above us at Easington, a well patrolled gas terminal. We come slightly inland to reach a path which marks the entrance to the Spurn Nature Reserve, but are soon back on a narrow stretch of sand which lies between the entrance and Spurn Head itself and which, at the next high tide in about 5 hours, will probably be at least part submerged. At the other side of the sand, a 2 mile long pathway leads to the lighthouse although, for the last few hundred yards, John follows an alternative route along a parallel raised embankment. We stop briefly at the lighthouse to buy much needed cold drinks and then continue past the lifeboat station and through bushes to reach the Point itself where the Humber meets the North Sea. An amazing spot. From here, it’s a short drop down to the beach and we decide to follow this route, on the North Sea side, for some of the journey back to the Spurn entrance. However, Ben’s progress is being slowed by a sore achilles, so Mike scrambles up a short but steep sand bank to see whether it affords access to the embankment which John used earlier. It does, but Ben thinks that it would be easier for him to keep walking along the beach than to try and climb the bank. Mike stays on the embankment and the four of us are re-united by the sand at the inland end of the 2 mile pathway. From here we return to the Spurn entrance and then spend around 30 minutes walking on minor roads to reach our overnight stop alongside the Humber estuary, the Crown & Anchor pub at Kilnsea. We arrive at 5:15 having completed 17.5 miles in just over 6 hours since leaving Withernsea. The next 45 minutes are spent in the bar during which time (1) we have a couple of pints; (2) we determine through a lengthy heads and tails process who will room with whom (for the first time in several years we are not in single rooms tonight); (3) we order our supper so that we can eat at 7 o’clock, before a “large group” arrives at 7:30; and (4) following negotiations between John and an ostensibly intransigent landlady who has said that breakfast isn’t served until 9 a.m., we also order breakfast so that it will be on the table at 8:45. Almost as exhausted by the admin as by the walk, we freshen up (the sharing arrangements are John & Mike and Ben & Gary) and return to the bar in time for 7 o’clock supper service or, in John and Mike’s case, in time for another pint before supper. The food is good (fish cakes and chips for Gary; fish, chips and mushy peas for the rest) and is accompanied by a bottle of white and the long awaited return of a bottle of Shiraz. There’s no evidence of it also being accompanied by a particularly large group of other diners. The main course is finished soon after 8 and, given our uncharacteristically late breakfast time, we don’t see any need to retire too early, so we while away another hour or so with three of us (Ben being the exception) having an equally uncharacteristic dessert and all of us having a less uncharacteristic sticky. Whilst ordering the stickies, John has a chat with a bloke at the bar who reckons that we should be able to follow a path alongside the Humber for most of our planned walk tomorrow, although some bramble patches near the end may necessitate an inland diversion. Duly encouraged, and having polished off the stickies, we climb the wooden hill to our rooms.