If Yorkshire was a clock face, the area roughly at half past four – the string of villages on the south bank of the Ouse – is one of its most obscure corners. And it’s a strange clock that I’m here to see.
When I grew up, in North Ferriby just downstream outside Hull, I’d always thought that these riverside settlements of Swinefleet, Reedness, Whitgift and Ousefleet were in Lincolnshire, they seemed so remote: only accessible by a flat, meandering road out from Goole. In fact they were in the West Riding then, and are now in the East Riding, but either way, they’re solidly in the historic county of Yorkshire that I recognise in this blog.
I cycled down from York this gloriously sunny day on the doorstep of spring, down the Solar System Greenway, through Selby and along the Transpennine Trail to Howden, over Boothferry Bridge to Goole, and out along that lazily winding road through flat, flat farmland alongside the muddy brown waters.
At Reedness I stopped at an honesty box selling ‘artisan’ (ie ‘home-made’) apple juice for my mum, a devotee of the stuff. It ticked all the woke boxes that would enrage a Trump supporter, so I bought some: ethical, sustainable, fair-trade, organic, low on food inches. Apple juice, by the way, ticks another box for my mum: the one my grandad would have described as ‘keeping regular’.
Just before Whitgift I was pleased to come on a sort of fishing scarecrow figure at a bridge that put me in mind of the Fisher of Dreams sculpture on the Solar System Greenway I’d passed earlier. Little villages often seem to specialise in this sort of informal homespun artwork. I expect there’s not much to fill the long summer evenings.
But it was Whitgift’s church, St Mary Magdalene a mile on, that I was here to see. Partly it’s the crooked nature of the stonework, repeatedly sunk off kilter on the marshy land and bodged back into shape.
But mainly it’s the clock. Because, uniquely in Britain, it has a 13 where you’d expect a 12: XIII, not XII. Nobody knows why. Clerical error? Misalignment that required an extra I for balance? The inevitable drunken-craftsman hypothesis?
Could it be something to do with the date of installation? The clock is inscribed with the year MCMXIX, the year after the Great War finished, and the legen IN TERRA PAX: Peace on Earth. Some kind of apocalyptic reference to a 13th hour of doom?
Anyway, rest assured the clock doesn’t strike thirteen at noon, like some dystopian timepiece in Orwell’s 1984. Just twelve, as normal.
The church was locked so I couldn’t go in. There was, however, more obscure psychogeography to be experienced just a mile further along the shore: a legendary cartographic void at Ousefleet…