Manor Farm, Woodmansey, East Riding of Yorkshire

We travelled up from Lincoln today without great event, aside from the fact that there was no roadside service centre to act as a layby so we spent almost two hours on the side of the A15 in a “parking”, rocked and rolled by the passing lorries; this does not make for very peaceful reading and lunching time. 

Our route was directly north on the A15, with a brief eastward leg on the M180 before turning northward again on the A15, crossing the Humber, the estuary formed by the rivers Trent and Ouse) on the 2,220 metre single span suspension toll bridge that was opened to traffic in 1981.  When it was opened, it was the longest of its type in the world until it was surpassed in 1998 with the completion of another in Japan, and now it is the eighth longest.

Chris says he remembers crossing it as a child, but this is quite impossible, because there was no predecessor. This one and only such crossing here was first mooted in 1872 when the plan was to build a tunnel rather than a bridge. The following century brought a series of proposals, but economic barriers put paid to them all until in 1959, when approval was granted for the construction of a suspension bridge, although it was not until 1973 that work finally began.

This all means that Chris’s memory of the bridge is entirely fantasy, or a morphed memory; we all have those.

Our camp just south of Beverley is again on a small farm, this one much more manicured than the last, and looking much more like a camping ground. The facilities are excellent; the tariff is the same as the last although here we have to pay for our electricity usage as well. 

When Chris asked me if I had tomorrow’s sightseeing all planned out, I said I had only a vague plan at this stage; to head back down into Hull, or more correctly Kingston upon Hull, 2017’s UK City of Culture, a metropolis of over 260,000 people. At our last camp two of our fellows on arrival were from near here and they did question our desire to visit their city; we hope to prove their nonchalance wrong.