Fri 03/08/2018

The first week of August saw us taking a break in south-east Yorkshire. The swifts were still in full flight when we left, but I considered that they would be mostly gone by the time we came back. Be that as it may, today we took a trip down to Spurn Head, a long, lean spit of land that tails off of the Yorkshire coast downwards into the Humber estuary. The spit itself is the result of erosion further up the coast, where silt and mud has been washed away from the cliffs and deposited here at the extreme south-east corner. There is a lighthouse and a coastguard’s station right down at the tip, so the authorities have endeavoured to shore up the road, but it is often buffeted by storms, and one just a couple of years ago washed a great section of the road away and effectively ended any plans to continue the hopeless defense. Still, there is a nice stretch of shingle beach at the landward end, and here I found a mermaid’s purse, empty sadly, but still a nice find. The so-called mermaid’s purse is the egg sac of a dogfish.