People Power

Every village in the UK has a story to tell.

Skipsea, in East Yorkshire is fairly typical. It lies just about 1km inland from the North Sea Coastline, one of the fastest eroding in Europe and so that distance may already be diminished further as I write. The road, once serving a number of chalets and huts and a well frequented cafe now ends abruptly above a 8 metre drop onto the pebbled sands. The cafe had long since toppled over.

To the North East is the grand sweep that takes in the resort town of Bridlington and with its easternmost cusp at the massive chalky promontory of Flamborough Head and its highly visible lighthouse landmark. Just to the south is the smaller town of Hornsea.

The area is popular in the high season with visitors to large caravan parks just along the clifftop  and with braver souls passing through for a bracing walk on the exposed sands during the rest of the year.

The road through the village sweeps westwards at the bottom of the hill from Hornsea, past a group of inter war and post war Local Authority houses and the school and then twists and turns at the small village green, likely to have hosted fairs and events for millenia, being surrounded by a number of sea-cobble walled cottages and larger houses and some nondescript infill development from the modern era.

The name Skipsea, to me, conjurs up a happy image of playing in holiday mood in perpetual sunshine and balmy heat. It is in fact of Scandinavian derivation meaning a lake navigable by ships. In more distant history the area was an important one for settlers from the Stone and Bronze Ages and excavations by various organisations has revealed artefacts from the Roman, Romano-British and Saxon periods.

The BBC TV Time Team programmes carried out a major investigation as a follow up to a local resident who regularly grubbed up interesting items in the fields and meadows. In the brief and hectic time scale of this popular series the overall conclusion was that Skipsea had been of major Norman occupation and habitation. This is to be seen in the rounded banked remains of an 11th Century Motte and Bailey Castle attributed to one of William the Conquerors invaders amongst a moat and other earthworks. The castle appears to have been linked by a causeway across the navigable lake to the village cluster itself.

The rural surroundings on rich boulder clays supported large Manors and wealthy families throughout the Middle Ages and little appears to have disrupted such livelihoods for the proceeding centuries.

Population numbers were fairly stable until the post war years of the 20th Century when new bungalows and chalets attracted fresh residents, many seeking a retirement home. Their attention to the attractive environment of Skipsea may have been a consequence of holidaying in the area and in the 1930's many timber chalets and shacks sprang up on the long straight road down to the beach.

It is easy to see how many vacations will have been spent in such an idyllic place.

In the hierarchy of nearby villages and indeed not until you get to the grand country houses at Burton Agnes and Burton Constable Skipsea does tend to enjoy more than its share of antiquities and curiosities.

However, perhaps the greatest claim to fame or potential infamy if it had been allowed to materialise for the village was its shortlisting and actual provisional choice in 1953 as the best place to carry out live atom bomb detonations.

This had been a long and drawn out process by the UK Atomic Weapons Station at Aldermaston to keep in the game amongst world powers in maintaining and improving "The Bomb".

Various coastal sites were researched but gradually eliminated. The striking and towering cliffs of Duncansby Head, near Wick high up on the north eastern flatop of Scotland was felt to be too wet and windy to give reliable testing conditions. Donna Nook, just south of Grimsby on the Lincolnshire coast, already a military range, fell short in other requirements.

It therefore came down to Skipsea as prime candidate.

There had been an RAF base there from the 1930's and control was just to be relinquished making secondment to Aldermaston to be a natural progression.

We are today aware of the level of opposition from rural communities to such things as wind farms, bio-fuel power stations, intensive livestock rearing and even affordable housing projects.

In the 1950's there was understandable local uproar at the prospect of the resident population being forcibly evacuated to make way for nuclear obliteration. The Local MP was mobilised to point out that people did live there and might be upset.

In hindsight Skipsea was wholly unsuitable given its proximity to the large towns of Bridlington and Beverley and not too far away from the major regional city of Hull.

The eventual location for atom bomb testing was Maralinga in Australia. The indigenous population were less vociferous than the inhabitants of Skipsea or just plain ignored. It took until the McClelland Commission in 1984-85 to highlight the sheer negligence and wilful exposure of locals and serviceman to fallout from a series of blasts throughout the 1950's.

Skipsea appears no worse off for its traumatic experience at the hands of the boffins.