Spurn Point

A sand spit three miles long and barely fifty metres wide curves into the Humber Estuary, narrowing until the sea on both sides is close enough to hear in stereo. Spurn Point is the most fragile landform in England — a thread of sand the North Sea is slowly pulling apart.

Spurn, in the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust's care, reaches five and a half kilometres into the Humber's mouth from the Holderness coast — a coast eroding at roughly two metres a year, the fastest retreat in Europe, its lost cliffs feeding the spit by longshore drift. The spit itself has been breached, destroyed and reformed across the centuries, and a 2013 tidal surge broke the road, so the point is now reached on foot at suitable tides or aboard the Trust's high-wheeled safari vehicle — England's only tidal island you can effectively commute to. The tip holds both World Wars' military remains and a disused lighthouse, relics of a community that lived on borrowed land, and the estuary mouth is a migration highway: in spring and autumn the rarities arrive with a regularity that fills the hides.