Welcome to Keyingham & Holderness in East Yorkshire.

For those of you out there wondering where and what Holder­ness actually is, 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, rather than other parts of Yorkshire. It is thought that it was originally the western edge of "Doggerland" that extended as a watery, swampy, low-lying area linking eastern England to the Continent until 10000 years or so ago, before being inundated by rising sea levels in the North Sea.

..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 the village 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 along the north bank of the Humber 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 it used to be claimed that there were more pigs than people, and that its coastline is being eroded at one of the fastest rates in Europe (1.8-2.0 m per year on average).