With a pop. of 4,000, the compact yet minstered market town of Howden is one of East Yorkshire’s little gems. A pocket-sized Beverley, without the cows, racecourse or Wetherspoon. I’ve ridden through many times – it’s on the Transpennine Trail – but today I was there to investigate it from the saddle a bit more. I was after airships and mice.
From York’s it’s an easy, flat, mostly offroad path along that Transpennine Trail, starting with the famous Solar System Greenway, aka Planets Trail.
After prolonged wet spells, such as we’ve had all year so far, a patch near Naburn turns into a micro-lake, as it did today. Thanks to the sunshine, though, I had some nice reflections of amphibious cyclists to photograph.
At Riccall I peeled off east through a rather muddy Skipwith Common. The woods and commons paths were lively with families whose kids were stomping gleefully through puddles in pink and blue wellies. I could have done with a pair myself.
I rejoined the Transpennine at Hemingborough and negotiated its just-OK offroad section to the Derwent mouth lock and then cul-de-sac road to Howden itself, and the glorious sunlit Minster… and its mice.
The cute rodents are decorative, carved into the woodwork of the Minster’s pews, stalls and cupboards. All these came from the workshop of Yorkshire craftsman Robert Thompson of Kilburn. He hid mice into all his carvings, a jokey reference to being as poor as a church mouse. As a cycling writer I know the feeling.
Scan websites, or – unwisely – trust AI summaries, and you’d get the idea that spotting the ‘dozens’ of mice is easy. It isn’t. They’re surprisingly hard to spot. I spent half an hour poking around, crawling in pews, bending into stalls, and running my fingers round dark edges and unlit cornices, finding precisely none. Goodness knows what the other visitors thought I was up to.
It was fun searching for the little murines, though. After about 45 minutes I’d managed four, and thought that would do. It’s not easy even to give hints or directions; you just have to keep looking. You might have more chance spotting real harvest mice out in the field. But there may well be some near you: Thompson mice appear in many churches and elsewhere across Yorkshire and Britain.
The east side of the Minster offers an unusual aspect. In front of it is the ruins of the old minster, plus a curious modern pointy addition that was no doubt a good idea at the time but which looks a little puzzling now. It doesn’t have any mice on it. It might benefit from one or two.
Facing all that is the market square, which looked grand in the sun today. Leading off it is a path to the Ashes Park, and the town’s airship trail. It celebrates the fact that Howden was a boom town for airships in the 1920s. The R100 was built here with local labour, but the crash of its competitor the R101 suggested that huge bags of easily-buffeted, highly flammable gas might have safety implications, and airships rapidly fell out of favour.
Two leading figures in the R100’s construction were Barnes Wallis and Neville Shute (…Norway). Shute later found fame as an author, notably of the scary post-apocalyptic story On the Beach. Of course the prospect of nuclear annihilation is way down the list of existential threats to humanity now. Though only because other, even scarier, threats have arisen.
Barnes Wallis was commemorated by a pub near Howden train station a mile north of town, now alas closed and turned into a private house. So while waiting for my train home I had a beer or two in the Wellington, just off the market square: a nicely-balanced bitter by Old Mill Brewery of nearby Snaith, only £4 a pint. Wallis and Shute must have enjoyed a bevvy or two here, talking aviation and literature and mice.
En route to the train I went past Howden’s final claim to fame for today. The Press Association have a base here, though their East Yorkshire outpost (a branch of PA Media) is more about compiling TV listings now than filing hard news stories. Still, it provides a few dozen local jobs.
So what marketing slogan could we come up with for Howden’s under-celebrated pearl of a market town? Howden, where imagination takes flight? Howden, it’s not just full of hot air? Howden, as seen on TV? Howden, the mouse town you can click with?
You can see why I never made a career in marketing.