A trip to Spurn Point (part 1)

Spurn Point is a location I’ve wanted to visit for a long time. It’s a spit of land that extends from the Holderness coast in Yorkshire into the mouth of the Humber estuary. It is a slender piece of land three miles in length, widening at it’s southern tip, but being less than 50 metres wide at it’s narrowest point.

At times during its recorded history, storm tides have breached the neck, cutting off the tip and forming an island. The last breach was, I believe, back in 2013 which destroyed the single road to the tip making it passable only by foot or all-terrain vehicles (such as a Unimog truck that ferries tourists to the lighthouse and back).

The Holderness coast, and Spurn, are subject to significant coastal erosion (spurn being the beneficiary of the material eroded from further up the coast) and this has affected the geography of the location over time with various settlements lost to the sea in past centuries.

Spurn has been used for a number of purposes over it’s history, including coastal defence, lifeboat station, and the location of lighthouses and traffic control for shipping passing in and out of the Humber. It is now owned and managed by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and attracts a large number of visitors keen to experience the creatures, particularly birds, that make their homes there.

There are two lighthouses still standing on Spurn, both now decommissioned – Smeaton’s high light, and Walker’s low light. The Walkers lighthouse stands in the mud flats to the west of the strip of land, it’s light aparatur removed and replaced by a water tank. Smeatons light stand on the land of the spit and is open to tourists, and you can climb the narrow staircase to where the light was once installed. Other noteable structures include the lifeboat crew houses, which are also empty, the tall shipping control tower with its still active radar, the old lifeboat jetty, and various structures remaining from wartime.

I made pictures with three cameras across four rolls of film, so I’m going to split them into batches. This first set were shot with my Fujica GW690 (Texas Leica) on Fomapan 400. Sadly, the pictures were affected with a defect giving a lot of white speckles on the final images. This was also compounded by bromide drag when I developed them, although I’ve Photoshopped the worst of this away. Despite these setbacks, they still have a certain charm to them, I think.