I was recently given a postcard showing the above aerial photo of Spurn Point. A detailed study of the photo shows that the picture was taken years ago, the postcard being produced for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. However, the picture does show, more obviously than is apparent walking the spit, how easily the area of land at the end of the spit could become an island were the narrow section of the spit to be breached by marine action along most of its length. A section of the narrow spit was breached in the last decade so it is now only possible to walk it full length at low tide and, of course, researches, mostly by members of the Geography Department at Hull University in the mid to late 20th century, showed that the spit has been successively destroyed and restored in a north westerly direction over the last millennia, this process allied to the rapid marine erosion along the coast of the plain of Holderness (for a diagrammatic representation of this process since the 7th century see Jones, N.V., editor, A Dynamic Estuary: Man, Nature and the Humber (Hull University Press, 1988, p.29). The late George de Boer, writer of the article including p29 in the above book, actually sites the early 14th century port of Ravenser Odd as being at the end of the then spit, this spit being ‘two spits’ south east of the present one. The spit on which Ravenser Odd developed, according to de Boer, had been built-up since the 12th century (see above diagram ref.).
Such a hypothesis serves to make Ravenser Odd seem much more plausible.