In a changing climate, the instinct is to save everything you can. But maybe letting go is braver – and better for the future?
Skipsea, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. Untitled from the series Lost Villages by Neil A White. All photos © Neil A White, except where noted
Skipsea, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. Untitled from the series Lost Villages by Neil A White. All photos © Neil A White, except where noted
is a freelance writer, whose work has appeared in The Guardian, New Statesman and The Independent, among others. He is the author of The Village Against the World (2013) and Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World (2024). He lives in London, UK.
On the promenade at Withernsea, on Britain’s East Yorkshire coast, next to the public toilets, there is a beautiful memorial engraved in stone, framed by waist-high sculptures of two churches. These are the Sister Kirkes, named for a local medieval myth that told of two sisters who could not agree on the style of the church they wished to build – so they each built their own: one with a steeple, the other with a tower. ‘The sea eventually claimed both,’ the plaque reports, matter-of-factly.
Owthorne, site of one of the drowned churches, is one of around 30 ‘lost villages’ along the 61 km of the Holderness coast, from Flamborough Head in the north, down to Spurn Head, at the mouth of the Humber river. One of 30 lost settlements we know the names of, that is: places that existed, and ceased to exist, in the past millennium. Holderness is the fastest-eroding coastline in Europe (at a rate of 2 metres a year), along with nearby north Norfolk – the process long preceding the climate crisis. Thomas Sheppard’s The Lost Towns of the Yorkshire Coast (1912) includes a map illustrating the thick strip of land lost to the waves since Roman times, showing many of those lost settlements: Colden Parva, Hartburn, Dimlington, Monkwike and, most famously, Ravenser Odd, a medieval pirate utopia of great renown and influence.
