Our Hill

It's not a great, towering, spectacular hill, and in moments of decrying our puny efforts it could be termed just a mound - for it is actually man made. Its history is inextricably mixed with the foreshore, and the effect upon it of a mighty river.

Many thousands of years ago the land round here was under the North Sea and then, we are told, when the last Ice Age melted away, boulder clay was brought down from the Yorkshire hills and deposited on either side of what became a meandering river with many tributaries. The continued contribution of mud-bearing rivers from the west meeting sea tides from the east produced a great estuary with deep channels changing from north to south and re-shaping the foreshore, year by year. Just eastward, at the edge of the slight rise in the land which provided our village settlement, a priory was built, and it probably had a good deal of brickwork, like other medieval buildings around here. The lack of stone hereabouts and the abundant boulder clay meant that many brickworks developed along the foreshore on both sides of the river, and the priory site was a busy brickworks in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Such brickworks, in their heyday, contributed to the building of many a civic, military and domestic edifice in the country around the Humber before they became redundant, leaving behind them excavated clay land, ponds of fresh or briny water, and rows of brickyard cottages. Modern man, inundated by the overspill from his material world, dumped his rubbish on such foreshore sites, thus defining waste-land. A newer generation saw the folly of this as the rubbish accumulated and underwent a twice daily re-distribution from west to east whenever the spring tides encroached upon it; the threat posed by its proximity to the village, and the eyesore to rail travellers passing along its north border was met by the parish council obtaining the land - doubtless it came dirt cheap.

The first act of re-reclamation was to cover this large and irregular accumulation of rubbish, varying from domestic garbage to building rubble, with rough earth brought from nearby land excavated for building purposes, and consisting of boulder clay not dissimilar to the original native soil. In this way, the parish council, aided by nature's propensity to sow seeds and produce a motley and varied plant life, found itself in possession of an interesting patch of re-claimed land on the foreshore. Following the natural trend minute bushes and trees were planted with their cylindrical overcoats and the more northerly sections of the land became festooned with these contributions to posterity. Meanwhile, the southern border of what had by now become an appreciated foreshore walk, continued its twice daily contest with the river, for which it was no match. Periodically, and most particularly at spring tides, great masses of the bank would fall away, liberating the underlying debris and revealing the garbage pattern of the preceding half century.

Concern for the environment and massive funding were combined to repair the foreshore by a remarkable feat of engineering: the edge, which, by the dumping and disguising activities of the immediate past, had become considerably raised, was cleanly excavated before being covered by huge sheets of special fabric which were to be fixed, above and below, in neatly dug trenches and then covered by huge boulders transported from inland quarries; it involved the removal and replacement of many tons of material by huge efficient machines and a few very skillful operators. At an early stage in the operation it was decided that the mixture of earth and debris removed to produce a manageable cliff face would be transported to the northern side of the site to make a huge heap, which, by suitable shaping of its contours, would become a hill some thirty feet in height. It was a marvel of modern mechanisation to see two machines with their experienced drivers produce a mound which would dwarf many a man-built barrow. The final stage of this great feat of earthworking consisted of covering the untidy surface of the hill with a thick layer of soil transported from elsewhere, and herein must dwell some of the secrets of its ecology.

This phase of the foreshore conservation was finished before the wet and windy weather of our northern wintertime, and the regular walkers there were left to enjoy the solitude again. Early next spring the hill was covered, more-or-less uniformly, by quite a dense crop of green plants with regular pinnate leaves. They grew quite vigorously to about the height of flourishing willow-herb, and became surmounted with a spike of yellow-green florets. Hardly any other plants adorned the hill that first growing season and the weld - for that was its identity - reigned supreme.

Weld grows to four feet in height, and although not a spectacular plant when viewed from a distance, close inspection shows the little flowers forming its spiked head to be attractive in both composition and colour. It is seen elsewhere as an occasional inhabitant of waste land, and is noticeable as occurring in clumps on recently disturbed land, particularly in the westward direction along the foreshore where the river constantly erodes away the clay cliffs which form the edge of a long-cultivated field. On our hill it was striking as the sole occupant of its freshly constituted surface that first spring, whereas the following year it was found only occasionally among the thistles, dock, and other common inhabitants. It is a member of the Mignonette family - the Residaceae - named Reseda luteola with reference to its yellowish green colour. It occurs sparsely throughout Europe, but was commoner in the Middle Ages when it was cultivated in some counties, including Yorkshire, as a source of a brilliant yellow dye which can be obtained by crushing the plant before soaking it in water. With woad for blue, and madder, for red, it constituted the dyers trio, and, since a relatively large amount was required to colour each pound of wool, crops were common in wool-producing areas such as Holderness.

Clearly, to judge by its easy exclusion form our hill after the first year, and its otherwise sparse occurrence, it is not strongly indigenous to these parts; why, then, was it so abundant in the first year of the mound's existence? Either its seeds were suddenly introduced to the fresh soil from an adjacent site by wind or insects, which seems unlikely when other commoner and more successful local invaders had not yet reached it, or the seeds were already in the covering layer of soil and had been transported with it from elsewhere. For the latter explanation to hold true, the seeds must have been in such abundance as to have come from a site previously cultivated with weld for use as a dye, but such crops disappeared many years ago with the development of modern chemical dyes to meet the needs of the wool industry; the weld seeds may well have become buried deep in the subsoil of this ancient site and remained dormant until it was excavated and brought to the sunlight on the surface of our newly created hill - seeds have been known to survive far less friendly environments and remain capable of germination many years later. It is touching that the efforts of our local planners to restore a little beauty to our environment should be graced with so fine a demonstration of Nature's resilience.