The Wolds, Part One

It takes a week to cycle from Penzance to Berwick. It took me 40 years. Because on the way, I wanted to include every town in England, in what amounted to some two years of day-rides. Most of these rides were point-to-point, but some were loops, and some looked on the map like a dropped noodle. It wasn’t a continuous line, but many separate lines, and all rides included towns I had not visited before. I used trains to get to starting points. Each ride had to be at least 20 miles, and in each new town, I had to touch a central feature, ideally the market cross or town hall. This is just one of hundreds of rides on this lifetime’s journey. A few more journey write-ups can be found at my “Riding the Shires” website, from which this was taken, at ukbicyclist.weebly.com (along with a couple of long memoirs of the Soviet bloc).

Some find the Wolds of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire monotonous. Not me. These modest, rolling hills are the northernmost formation of the chalk belt winding its way up England from Dorset. I grew up on the chalk. I have always felt comfortable with the white stuff underfoot.

The Wolds of Yorkshire are the least visited of that county’s many and varied upland regions. Like the moors, they are ecologically rather barren; pastures and factory-farmed prairie-lands of cereal and rape have taken over most of the original cover of chalk grassland. But this bareness is a quality I quite like. On the airy heights, looking out over the surrounding ridges seeming to roll in like billows, you feel as away from it all as a lone yachtsman on an ocean.

This midwinter jaunt in 2006 began at Hull, from where I meant to ride as far north as daylight would allow. Scarborough was the target, from where I could catch a train back to South Yorkshire.

I set off in chilly, misty, grey weather, more November than January in feel, which only underlined the dreariness of East Hull. I was a student once in this city, but I only really knew West Hull, where the Georgian-stroke-Victorian centre, university and most of the nicer bits are. The east side of the River Hull was where the docks, the dereliction and the working-class people were. Each side had its own rugby team; there was quite a rivalry. Another old dividing line in the city, which I didn’t find out about until long after I’d left it, was between “wet-side” and “dry-side.” Wet-side was where you found the trawlers and the catch-handling quays, while dry-side (I think) was the docking, warehousing and other industries. The west was supposedly wet-handed, the east dry.

Little fish is landed at Hull today. Instead, it’s known throughout the north for “supping beer and fighting,” a policeman once told me. He had interviewed dozens of Friday-night drunks. “From as far afield as Newcastle and Liverpool. They all said the same thing: Hull was for cheap birds and beer.”

There is a lot more to Hull than this, as any visitor to the little-known Georgian merchants’ streets along the River Hull will confirm, but I struggle to sing the praises of the east side. The cyclist finds little more than gantries, container stacks, factory sheds, shabby offices and long security fences, interspersed with tatty streets and shopping arcades, all under grey skies raucous with gulls. I cannot recall the sun ever shining in east Hull, and it sure wasn’t this morning of mist and drizzle.

The one feature worth a stop was an old smock mill, complete with four broken sails and fantail, now incongruously wedged between a flower shop and a taxi-stand in the Holderness Road. Derelict, battered but yet defiant, it stood almost as a symbol of Hull itself.

Above and below, Hull scenes in the 2010s

Bransholme housing estate, one of England’s largest

Leaving all this behind, I ventured out into Holderness itself. Holderness is the nearly flat corner of Yorkshire wedged between the north bank of the Humber and the North Sea coast. The lanes were quiet, but there wasn’t much to stop for here either, apart from its two odd little defunct canals, the Leven and later the Driffield, both of which were used for shifting coal and agricultural produce about the region.

At barely three miles long, the Leven was possibly the shortest commercial canal in England and probably the only one commissioned by a land-owning lady of the shires, one Charlotta Bethell. It was built to link little Leven with the River Hull, giving access to Hull itself, as an expensive and seemingly rather pointless alternative to the road system, which is flat and direct.

This was solid farming country. Stopping at a garage store, for want of anywhere more interesting, I scrutinised quad parts, hedge-trimmers and sacks of fertiliser. I spent a good minute or two puzzling over what looked like instruments of torment from the Tower and turned out to be sets of livestock dental forceps, according to the equally baffled shop-owner, who could not understand what a passing cyclist was doing gawping at this stuff.

“Actually,” I said, “I was hoping for a coffee.”

“Sorry.”

“And you don’t have any toilets by any chance?”

“Yes, as it happens I do. About 27.”

“Eh?”

“Portaloos out back. We hire them out. Ten quid a box a day. How many units would your bladder be requiring?”

Less amusing was the manager of the next shop, a small supermarket in Brandesburton. There were four people queuing at the one till, and this guy, filling shelves, knowingly made us wait till he finished a row, which took a few minutes. A small thing, but telling. I’ve always found the most bloody-minded of all the Yorkshires to be the East Riding.

Then, finally, the gentle climb up into the Wolds. A lonely, lofty world came into view, feeling much higher than it actually was. Gone were the oak-lined field lanes, the flitting hedge birds and the plain but comely dark-brick cottages of Holderness. As in the Lincolnshire Wolds south of the Humber, farms here were few and far between, and often set back at the end of chalk tracks a vast distance from the road. Villages were clusters of white-painted cottages with pantile roofs, the universal house-cover in East Yorkshire, and they too were infrequent.

All around was a great patchwork of sheep pasture and arable fields —  wheat, barley, potatoes —  dotted here and there with copses and coverts. This was classic enclosure country: the fields were huge and regular, the lanes and hedges long and straight, the verges as broad as the tarmac. You could see traffic crawling along a neighbouring ridge, like bugs on a counterpane, at a distance of two or three miles. There was nothing to disturb the view or take the edge off the breeze but marching rows of telegraph poles. No cover. This, I thought, must have been the worst place in the country to have been a highwayman or poacher.

Though both are chalk ranges, the southern downs and the Wolds are very different. The obvious difference is the scarcity of woodland on the Wolds. The less obvious one is the lack of flint. In the southern chalklands, there’s so much flint that it’s often the main traditional wall-building material, lousy as it is to work with. But here, houses were of freestone or brick. The upper slopes don’t show the surface rashes of knobbly white lumps as they do down south. This makes for much better soil, a Wolds farmer later told me. Wolds soil is “brashy,” that is, comprising “earthy oolite yielding fair land for corn.” By contrast, flints were such a bane in Chiltern farming that until modern times, women were sent out to pluck the wretched stones out of the clay.

A Wolds lane

Outside Filey, at Muston, was, according to a plaque, Europe’s “most northerly chalk-hill.” That was worth a quick coffee and ponder in the boozer. Now, chalk isn’t a very glamorous rock, lacking the rugged beauty and even mystique of limestone and other rock of the wilder parts. Yet globally, it’s a considerable rarity. Outside England, I have only ever seen it in northern France and Jutland, and looking it up now confirms that it’s only really found in Europe and a few other places. That’s one reason why the White Cliffs of Dover are such a potent and instantly recognisable symbol — chalk cliffs are unique in the world.

But chalk, which is actually the purest form of limestone, is pretty useless stuff outside the school classroom. It’s hardly ever used as a building material, since, attractive as it is, it doesn’t resist rain well. It’s used in some interior stonework, but even there it’s rare. Which made this little village particularly interesting. Because here, it looked as though the local masons had given it a go. Some of the cottages here were indeed built of chalk, in irregular, brick-sized blocks bonded with mortar, a bit like dirty white sandstone. These were first chalk-built cottages I’d ever seen, for there are few down south. I don’t know how they coped with the permeability issue.

Chalk cottage

It remained a rotten, drizzly day of the depths of winter, and dusk was already in the air by two-thirty. After descending from the Wolds, I entered Filey. This proved an interesting little seaside resort well worth spending a penumbral hour in. Even in this weather, people were out and about in the streets and fine gardens by The Royal Crescent.

This magnificent sweep of white apartment buildings, indeed the entire resort, was developed by a Birmingham solicitor, John Wilkes Unett, who bought seafront land here after shrewdly realising that the then-burgeoning railway network could bring the urban masses to the coastal watering places, as they were then styled. This one had an attractive bay, with low cliffs and broad sands, and a slightly out of the way location. It was a socially superior resort — few fairground smells or racket here — and retains something of that dignity to this day.

Filey did have a Butlins, though, one of the pioneer camps, built just before the war and immediately requisitioned by the RAF. It closed in 1983 after an operational life of less than 40 years, undone by cheap air travel and holiday options more enticing than knobbly-knees contests. With hindsight, Billy Butlin’s timing was as unfortunate as Unett’s was prescient.

The flat expanse of Filey beach, a plaque said, made it ideal as a landing strip for early aviators and also early automotive speed trials. I didn’t go down. Instead, I headed for the station and called off the ride here. No point in bashing on to Scarborough in damp, misty darkness.
 

© text & images Joe Slater 2024