Wise folk from ‘t East – particularly those without dogs

 It was a wet Sunday afternoon in February. For seven weeks the entire country’s population was compelled to live in a national lockdown. I was already hankering after travel. Any form of travel would do. A multi-day walk came to mind; these both soothe and invigorate me. The process of moving within a fresh landscape after incarceration at home wakes the brain and senses up again. Where should we walk next, I thought. Having lived in Yorkshire for nearly forty years an exploration of East Yorkshire was overdue. 

Anyone not familiar with God’s Own Country has a tendency to believe the landscape east of the Great North Road is flat and boring. 

This is not the case. In Yorkshire’s east country there are the Wolds - the word wold is an old English term applied to open and hilly country. My wife will attest to the fact that the Cotswolds and Yorkshire Wolds are anything but flat. Furthermore they contain some steep inclines; so she discovered on The Cotswold Way in 2004 and The Yorkshire Wolds Way in 2021. A week returned from the latter her knees and hips were still complaining about the hard work they had been put through and their residual discomfort.

It is true that the merits of the loiners from Leeds, the hill farmers in the Dales, the Wayers on the Pennines and the grouse on the Moors provoke much debate - both within the county borders and far beyond. They arouse more lively debate than do the wise and calm women and men of Kingston upon Hull, Filey and the Wolds. The city and town that mark the start and end of the Yorkshire Wolds Way are little talked about outside their boroughs. Hull has the stark looking Humber Bridge and a beautiful red brick university. It also has the most handsome public toilets in Britain. Lonely Planet reported in 2019 that the “93-year old brick-built loos in Nelson Street near Victoria Pier rub shoulders with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the British Museum and the Giant’s Causeway featuring in the top UK tourism attractions”. It’s true. They are inspiring particularly when you are caught short. Hull is also the end of the earth (or if you are a Yorkshireman perhaps it is the beginning of the earth) for on my first visit to Spurn Head, the spit of land that reaches in to the Humber, I thought I was about to fall off the planet. I felt there was nowhere else to go.

My party of five that set off on foot into this urban landscape on a balmy September morning had 79 miles ahead of us. It would take seven days. It is exciting to set off on foot into an unknown landscape. I had seven overnight accommodations arranged yet had no image of what they looked like, just a concept from booking with their owners many months ago. South Cave, Market Weighton, Millington, Thixendale, Wintringham and Ganton were just names on a map at roughly 12-mile intervals. (Ganton has its championship golf course but it is far from typical of the wolds landscape.) As we set off along the track adjacent to the Humber and under its eponymous bridge I began to think about how the landscape ahead was formed and what manner of men and women bestrode this land before us, who were the first to arrive and settle it and who has left their lasting impression?

We left Hull behind us in a poetic mood for I was, of course, aware of it being home for thirty years for Britain’s greatest post-war poet, Philip Larkin. Whilst he was born in Coventry (being a Midlander myself, also an adopted Yorkshireman and a bookman I tried to feel an affinity with the man) he spent his later years as resident librarian at Hull University. Here he wrote his finest verse including The Whitsun Weddings, judged by many as his finest poem. Yet I never was a poet, or now a reader of verse, despite having studied it at school and built up quite a collection from John Keats to Leonard Cohen with Robert Service somewhere in the middle.

The amount of research we did before our walk also reminded us that Bradford born David Hockney has done more than most of his contemporaries to put East Yorkshire into the public eye through his colourful works of art. We looked forward to walking through Thixendale, Huggate and Warter where Hockney painted in 2007.

Before the Bronze Age the hinterland of the Humber, and the bank we were walking along, was covered with woodland of oak and alder trees. Then sea levels rose swamping the tree roots with salt and killing them off. Around 1800 BC it is proven that adventurers from Holland or Denmark managed to cross the North Sea in wooden plank-built boats and made landfall at Ferriby, a few miles inland from Hull. In our path we found a replica of one of these boats that was first excavated in 1937. I am not a good sailor. I have taken the ferry from Hull to Rotterdam on several occasions and before each crossing I prayed for a calm sea. At Ferriby I was in awe of anyone who could row across the sea, more so that they did four thousand years ago.

After Ferriby we turned our backs to the Humber. (Some folk call it the River Humber, but they do so incorrectly. The rivers Trent and Ouse meet to form the Humber Estuary that drains into the sea at Hull to the north and Immingham to the south.) We anticipated the chalk hills of the Wolds and almost immediately started climbing. I let my mind wander back to the first days of previous multi-day walking expeditions that I had made. As I settle in to the start of each I find it a liberating and calming experience to put behind the rush of everyday life at home and the constant invasion of my senses by media-led tales of woe. On this expedition I shall try to ignore the news media. For seven days I shall escape the accursed covid, the risible antics of our bizarre national leader and the distant ramblings of a madman recently ejected from the White House, perhaps to return in 2024 as a nightmare for all sane people.

The East Riding of Yorkshire has plenty of historic churches. I know my belief in Christianity is under serious attack - I am more of a Raddled Anglican Agnostic - yet I love to visit churches and cathedrals so I can marvel at the artistry of the designers, the stonemasons, the painters, the woodcarvers and the musicians. 

And in Brantingham there is, what a visiting American might say, the darlingest little church. We were denied entry – probably due to that dratted covid – so we sat quietly on a bench by the lych gate and admired the 12th century building. The church sits in a tranquil dale that was settled by the Saxons after the Romans had departed - the latter leaving evidence of their presence in the form of scattered buildings and roads. Sharing our quietude was an elderly couple (in other words much older than us). The husband walked with the aid of a stick but his wife strode around the flagstone path with vigour and an upright bearing. We smiled. They smiled back. We asked them if they were local.

“Yes,” said the wife. “We were married in this church sixty-two years ago. We still live in Little Weighton.” They are older than us. We can only hope we look as healthy and bright as they do, many years from now of course, when we reach that milestone.

Climbing once more up to the top of Great Wold – all of 145 metres high – we found views for twenty miles in every direction. We looked back to the Humber, glistening yellow-grey in the late afternoon sunshine, and eastwards to the bridge. At this distance it looked magnificent, two uprights of shining steel with the black ribbon of road slung below but appearing graceful, arched against a post-industrial backdrop. Turning back to the route northeast and downhill towards South Cave we found, from opposite ends of history, two examples of human ingenuity in the landscape; first the outline of an Iron Age settlement and then the vivid green vines at Little Wold Vineyard planted in 2018. I made a note to myself: come back here in 2026 when the first wines should be released.

An archbishop of York was the principal landowner around here in in the 11th century. He handed ownership on to other clerical worthies and then lay brethren. In the 1750s this small town boasted nine inns, a sign by our path reading rather prosaically this was “an indication of trading importance”. Come on, this is not about the importance of commerce. It’s about local men and women getting hammered on Friday and Saturday nights after a hard week in the fields, busting a gut for His Excellency and the other rich landlord farmers. We were booked in to one of the inns, The Fox and Coney, opened in 1739 and ready to dispense some amber nectar to me, a mere tramper, some two hundred and eighty years later. Long before the village boasted nine inns it had become inhabited because it lay on a Roman road between York and Lincoln and, as the contemporary sign reads, farmers brought their produce to market here. When we climbed again out of the village we found ourselves in typical wolds landscapes for the remainder of the day – gentle hills, dry valley bottoms and woodland – until after twelve miles we came to Market Weighton where we encountered tales of two very differing East Yorkshiremen.

As I have indicated, East Yorkshire folk are quieter than their counterparts in the North and West Ridings. Hereabouts people tend to let their exploits speak for themselves and so it was we learned of William Bradley. This is not a name that is immediately familiar. Born in 1787 in Market Weighton William became Great Britain’s tallest man ever. At his birth William weighed 14 lbs. By the time he was eleven he weighed in at 11 stones. Before his twentieth birthday he stood 7 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 27 stones. He had a prodigious appetite (it was a good thing he worked for a butcher), enormous strength (he broke all the normal hand implements on the farms he worked at), and tremendous strength and stamina. He made a bet that he could fill a farm wagon with manure in less time it would take two men. His fame spread across the county when he carried a massive stone a quarter of a mile through the village streets. It rests to this day opposite the church. He went on to join a group of travelling showmen and became known as The Yorkshire Giant. When the group wasn’t paid William set up on his own and charged a shilling a view. Sadly humans of outsize physical proportions are not destined to live a long life. William’s body succumbed to tuberculosis and the strain of travelling and exhibiting himself. He died aged thirty-three. This freak of nature, like so many hapless individuals throughout history, found the intrusion of fame and conmen would ultimately lead to his early demise. He is buried in the village church, rather than in an exterior tomb, because of the fear of grave robbers making a visit. 

Unlike most of the places through which we travelled Market Weighton became a significant town because of a railway. To be precise, it attracted four railway lines. Situated mid-way between Hull and York the junction became a key rail link for the transport of chemicals, farm products and the chalk from local quarries. The lines and busy station all closed in 1965, due to the devil incarnate, Dr. Richard Beeching. During the ensuing years locals bought cars to get around. Beeching’s Axe of 1963, as his closure programme became known, resulted in congestion on our roads today, leading to an increase of greenhouse gases which contribute to global warming; our age’s biggest problem. I doubt that the prime minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, nor any since, thought of the long term and harmful consequences of closing down a third of the nation’s railway lines. It was madness and altered the way the landscape has been managed.

As with any industry undergoing huge growth and generating large profits railways have always attracted entrepreneurs and colourful characters. I like to think of George Hudson as the Richard Branson of his day. Living a century and half apart Hudson (born in York in 1800) and Branson (born in London in 1950) both saw potential in railways after having made their names and business fortunes in very different commerce. Hudson started his career in linen and drapery. In 1828 he was fortunate to inherit the sum of £30,000 from his great-uncle. He played a central role in linking London and Edinburgh by rail and making his hometown of York a vital rail link. He became involved in merging companies and earned great wealth but his accounting practices were suspect. He bought magnificent local estates in Market Weighton and Londesborough. But he paid dividends to his rail company shareholders out of capital and he sold land he did not properly own. His downfall was predictable. He was prosecuted for fraud after which he fled abroad to escape his creditors.

The last two miles of our walk into Market Weighton was along Hudson’s Way, one of George’s disused railway lines. I thought about how different this landscape must have looked and sounded in his time, when the steam trains could be heard from the next valley, as they belched out smoke and sparks, disturbing the wildlife and frightening the cows. It is certainly quieter now even if pollution from the internal combustion engines plying their way up and down the narrow lanes is killing off the trees, insects and birds.

About the time that Hudson owned the local estate there was born to the vicar in the town a daughter who would make a name for herself. Barbara Foxley grew up at a time when discrimination against women was egregious. Denied a degree at Newnham College at Cambridge University because of her sex she nonetheless gained a certified teaching qualification through Trinity College in Dublin, which was a more enlightened seat of learning. She went on to teach at the University of Manchester and University College, Cardiff. It was at the latter institution she, hardly surprisingly in my view, became an active suffragist. 

Barbara Foxley and her father would have been familiar with the nearby village of Wharram Percy. They probably walked there and found solace and inspiration in the idyllic valley remote from the hurly burly of the town. It is now a lost and deserted medieval village yet in the 13th century it boasted two main streets, two manors, a church dedicated to St. Martin and a mill with a fishpond. The only survivors of this isolated and tranquil settlement are parts of the church and the pond. Whilst we stopped for a rest I reflected on how a once bustling village has now become a place where conservers of history and heritage have taken over and erected ghastly signs and scaffolding leaving an anonymous structure. Undoubtedly disease, poor diet and early death took its toll on the medieval families. This was not confined to Wharram Percy but to all the villages of East Yorkshire. By the 17th century the youngsters of the villages would find opportunities for work, travel and improved health outside this plateau of chalk upland that was becoming poorer as the south became richer.

When learning of the lives and achievements of William Bradley, George Hudson, Barbara Foxley, Philip Larkin and David Hockney I considered once again what part did this landscape play in their lives. It is certainly true that this sparse land failed to keep them within its confines forever. The land between Filey and Hull is less populous today than in much of its history. For the most part it is an elevated landform with steep sides and dry valleys. Unlike The Lake District’s fells where sheep graze above the valley’s crops, the Wolds tops provide huge spaces for wheat and barley and the valleys house the cattle and sheep. The Lakes attract trippers. The Wolds don’t. For centuries rich landlords bought up the land and employed poorly paid farm workers. Inequality abounded amongst folk here. As emancipation took hold amongst the mass of workers, undiscovered human talent left these broad acres and found life opportunities much easier to develop in cities to the south and west. Today a few landowners control vast acreages and require little labour. So more people have left.

At the end of the trek lies Filey. This town is the essence of the East Riding. It is a fitting finale to the entire wolds landscape. It nestles quietly and modestly between steep cliffs at each end of a tranquil bay. The many guesthouses and terraced houses are neat and genteel. There is none of the glitz of Scarborough, no noise of appalling funfairs as on the Bridlington promenade; this is a place where people come to walk, think and quietly count their blessings in life. (Sadly many come with their dogs. These would be much better left in a pound at the gates of the town so I could be spared both the exasperated cries of owners entreating me to help search for their pooches and little green bags of shit hanging from the hedges.)

I shall return to the Wolds. My lasting impression from our walk through their delights will be one of space, quietness and tranquillity. There are more churches and galleries featuring local artists to explore. A heritage is there to be discovered and treasured. A corner of England that is overlooked by staycationers and foreigners provides a looking glass into a past feudal agricultural culture. Not much is happening on the surface of the landscape but within it lie many treasures of history and memories of unique lives.