A quick visit today to the village I grew up in, North Ferriby just outside Hull, to see what has put it on the map: the Ferriby Boats. We have a few claims to fame for a place of under 4,000 folk: Mariinsky dancer Xander Parish, weather presenter Alex Deakin, and anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce. Plus a village football side that somehow won the FA Trophy (the non-professional FA cup) in 2015, beating Wrexham at Wembley, before overachieving their way to the fifth tier of national football, imploding, and being wound up.
It’s a lovely area to live, surprisingly (to some southerners) like a Sussex Downs dormitory settlement, but half the price. It has a primary school, Co-op, friendly pub, cafes, train station, my mum’s house, and – most importantly – an excellent upscale bike shop, Vive le Vélo.
But it’s the boats which command top spot on the Wikipedia page. In 1930, while fossicking about on the muddy foreshore, local boy Ted Wright saw some planky bits sticking out of some newly exposed sand. In 1937, after further erosion revealed more of the wooden remains, Ted discovered what he thought might be an old boat.
Old it certainly was: it turned out to be one of three Bronze Age vessels, preserved almost intact in the gloop. A craft almost five thousand years old, that was ferrying people and grain and cloth and animals across the Humber – and maybe even out to sea – way before Stonehenge’s architect was explaining his concept to the clients. Only Egypt has older such boats.
The craft themselves are in Hull Museums now. But, down by the foreshore, their discovery is marked by a footprint of one of the boats. It’s splendidly situated, with a view of the Humber Bridge to the east, and south over the water to Lincolnshire.
Over on that other side is South Ferriby, the other terminal for the boats’ crossings. I cycled from there this morning, over the Humber Bridge itself, and admired South Ferriby’s own little boat tribute by the entrance sign.
The other Ferriby is obviously not as nice as ours. Though to be fair it does have some things we don’t, such as a cement factory. (Our nearest one is in Melton, two miles away.)
When I grew up here in the 1960s, the Ferriby Boats were not a thing. Nobody ever talked about them, and I’d never heard of them, though to be fair my reading consisted mainly of the Guinness Book of Records and The Beano.
To help people like me, a boat monument has an information board and is right on the Transpennine Trail, whose chalky gravel path runs right alongside the waterside between here and the Bridge. There’s also a friendly little cafe on the lane in from under the railway bridge, and a fairy-glade thing for kids to explore.
I didn’t need to stop at the cafe, as I had my own unlimited source of food, drink and jokeful chat: at my mum’s just up the road…