‘It’s not the cities that need protecting any more, it’s Spurn itself’
This Place, a column by Vicky Foster
Out on the edge with Spurn Military Safari
Pictures by Esther Johnson
It’s Saturday morning at Spurn Point, and there’s a stiff breeze rolling in off the Humber, lifting the soft swathes of pale grass that move against the sand dunes. I’m standing in a semi-circle of about fifteen people, listening to the man who is leading our tour.
He’s talking about interlocking fire, warships, counter battery guns – all words that are not unfamiliar to this place. But they seem incongruous today, when Spurn is peaceful and beautiful. When the only sounds are birdsong and the tide. It’s hard to believe we’re standing in the centre of what used to be a huge military camp.
Today I’m on the military safari and I was also here a few weeks ago, taking the wildlife safari. They’re both four-hour tours, organised monthly by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, who look after the site, and as part of both you get to ride on the ex-German-military Unimog vehicle, which is in itself, an amazing experience.
It’s one of the few vehicles that’s allowed to travel out as far as Spurn Point nowadays, since the ‘Beast from the East’ caused a tidal surge that destroyed much of the access road back in 2014. The Trust made the decision not to replace the road, and so the big-wheeled Unimog has carried us over the sand dunes from the visitor centre to begin the walking part of the tour.
Simon, our guide, is explaining that the military camp was set up urgently during World War One, as a response to German warships sailing along the east coast to Scarborough and firing on the town. It quickly became apparent that Grimsby and Hull, two of the busiest working ports in the country, needed to be protected.
The army moved in and the two huge, empty, slightly dishevelled-looking white buildings which we’re now standing outside of, used to house 160 of the five or six hundred men that were stationed along this part of the coast. Forts were also built out in the estuary, guarding its entrance. We can see them from here, hulking brown shapes in the sea-fret, now also empty. Because it’s not the cities that need protecting anymore. It’s Spurn itself.
I look out across the mudflats and see birds wading there. Remember the Brent Geese I saw a few weeks ago, that had flown in from Svalbard, the explanations about the reintroduction of oysters to the water, the management of the sea buckthorn and eel grass and other features that make Spurn such a haven for migrating birds and sea creatures. The landscape here is constantly changing, the arc of the point shifting according to the tides and the accumulation of eroded material from further up the coast. There are certain points in the year now when the edge of the peninsula is cut off by the water, creating a tidal island.
My group begins to move off, and I follow along the sandy path between the scrub, up rough concrete steps and out onto a platform into a space that feels almost like an amphitheatre. Grey walls with gaping black doorways surround a stone circle with rusted metal rings and rivets. The housing of one of the big guns, flanked by the sea and bright yellow gorse flowers. Simon shows us the casing of one of the shells the gun would have fired, and aerial photos of the site the way it looked during the wars.
We move on to what used to be a Nissen hut, built during the Second World War. The brick walls – blast walls that used to protect the huts – are shoulder height now, the light concrete floor is cracked in places, brambles and grass poking through. It’s scattered with sand and flat pebbles. Simon lifts a piece of burned black metal in his hand, and tells us it used to be the chimney, and it’s how they know that the hut used to a house a pot boiler stove. He, and his group of six other volunteers, found it when they reclaimed what remains of the building from the sand.
We move on to a magazine store, a room complete with roof, that we have to go down steps to enter. It’s echoey and muddy. Wavering lines halfway up the dirty white walls show where the sand level was before the volunteers dug it out. Then comes an old engine room, with its rich smell of oil and salt, its high ceilings and tall walls, decorated with graffiti.
Some of the original black and white tiles remain on the floor, and in between them, the sand has begun to gather again. The dates on the graffiti, Simon tells us, help to track the periods when the sand claimed this building back and when it was cleared again, so that people could walk around in it. I look more closely now and find that next to stencilling from the Second World War, there are stark black-markered names from 2022, and more faded ones from 1994.
When the rest of the group moves on, my friend and I stay behind a while, along with another man. We’re all quiet, gazing around the now echoing, empty space. Into the hushed silence, the man says, “It’s like a cathedral, isn’t it?” He’s right. It’s not just the height of the ceilings and the sense of space and peace, it’s that energy you get in churches too, of time spent here, the people who’ve passed through.
Between each building we pick our way over the landscape, climbing sandy dunes and grassy steps. Tracking the tide line. Moving between tiny red and green succulents, small purple flowers, ferns and moss. It’s mesmerising, all this shifting, from past to present, from subterranean buildings to fresh sea breezes and wide flat skies. But that’s the nature of Spurn. It’s never the same for long. The wildlife migrates, the tides are changing, the ground is shifting, the plant life is evolving, and Simon and his team are busy uncovering new buildings every Tuesday with their spades and wheelbarrows.
Three hours have flown by, and we head back towards the Unimog, which will take us to the restored Victorian lighthouse on the way back to the café. But before we leave Simon shows us where swallows have begun to nest in one of the buildings they uncovered in the last few weeks, and a how a huge pile of sand and rubble which has been cleared out from one of the buildings is now half-covered with nettles and grass. He tells us that in a few months, we won’t be able to tell it was ever there. It will look like just another dune.
Back in the café afterwards, I look out through the huge windows while I tuck into my cake and coffee, and wonder at just how much is going on along this thin strip of land on the East Yorkshire coast. All the cycles and the movement, the comings and goings, the giving and taking back again.
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