Holderness Peninsula

Case Study - The holderness Peninsula is located in Yorkshire, north of Hull and south of Scarborough. The coastline is marked out by Flamborough head to the north a rocky headland made of chalk and by Spurn Point a sandy spit to the south at the mouth of the Humber Estuary.
The coast is made up of glacial till (boulder clay) deposited by the scandinavian ice sheet at the end of the last glacial period. This SOFT mixture of clay, sand and gravel is easily washed away when subject to any water erosion and the waves of the North Sea are particularly effective!

Some 29 villages have been lost to the sea as the cliffs have eroded back at some 0.5 to 1m a year since Roman Times. One village, Mappleton, decided to resist this trend and built a large stone groyne made of granite boulders brought from Norway. The plan was to trap sand in front of the groyne brought southwards by the process of longshore drift and built up a protected beach in front of the cliffs. It worked. 

A new problem now arose, because the sand that used to travel southwards and offer some protection to the cliffs there, no longer did so. This caused the erosion rate to increase to between 7 and 10 metres a year. Farms such as Sue Earles dairy farm and caravan sites and even the gas terminal at Easington came under threat of cliff collapse and destruction. So did the SPIT at Spurn Point which has already been breached due to the lack of sand travelling south.
This is an example of how human activity in one place can have an effect on people in another locality.

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