TheSutherlands

Welcome to Keyingham in Holderness, East Yorkshire.

holderness map

For those of you out there wondering where and what actually is Holderness, then take a look at this map. Holderness is the low lying area bounded by the Humber Estuary and Spurn Head to the South, by Hull and the hills of the Yorkshire Wolds to the West, and by the North Sea to the East. It has more in common, topographically, with the Netherlands, than other parts of Yorkshire.

...lonelier and lonelier, and after that the birds and lights of Spurn Head, and after that the sea. Philip Larkin

The Prime Meridian (Greenich Meridian) passes through Holderness 7 km to the east of Keyingham.

The land of Holderness is very fertile consisting of boulder clay left by the last Ice Age and alluvium on the Humber flood plain. Much of this land bordering the Humber is reclaimed; indeed one small village is known as "Sunk Island."

In the last few years the Environment Agency has breached the sea-defences in a number of places to allow regular, controlled flooding and create inter-tidal zones to compensate for loss of marshland habitats to new developments elsewhere in the region.

Two other claims to fame, or otherwise, for Holderness are that there are more pigs than people, and that it's coastline is being eroded at the fastest rate in Europe (1.5m per year on average).

© Ian SutherlandEmail: web@thesutherlands.co.uk