The powerful force of a gale far out in the German Ocean abated slightly as the white crests of the high tide rushed towards the yawning mouth of the Humber estuary. The swell lashed the sinuous curve of Spurn Point, and struck again when it reached the reclaimed banks of Sunk Island and Cherry Cobb Sands in Holderness. But they didn’t break, and the tide went on to raise the level of the River Hull, already high from the draining of the lowlands, so that many houses sited close by were flooded, as they so often were.
Onward it flowed towards the confluence and wide flat plain of the Ouse and the Trent, the trumpet-shaped channel narrowing as it reached Hessle to create a flood tide that covered the wetlands and salt marsh beyond Brough, Broomfleet and Ellerker Sands and the outlying hamlets and villages in this low-lying and lonely landscape.