The following story is the winner of The Conversation Prize for writers 2026, a competition run in partnership with Faber and Curtis Brown. Read more about the competition here.

“It’s a heck of a way”. My parents are surprisingly resistant to visiting Spurn Point. It’s the second summer of the COVID pandemic, and my husband, young son, and I are holidaying near their home, so we can sit with them in their garden. I’ve suggested a day trip to the very edge of the land – a skinny, hooked, peninsula, far off to the east of Hull.

Windswept and bleakly beautiful, Spurn Point (or Head) has coastal sand dunes on one side and estuarial mud flats on the other. It is a National Nature Reserve, littered with the military detritus of two world wars, an abandoned railway, and a lighthouse. It is also the closest we can get to Ravenser Odd – the sunken medieval island that obsesses me.

Ravenser Odd was a real place. And yet it feels like myth. Its story is brief and dramatic. New land emerged in the mouth of the Humber estuary, sometime in the early 13th century, and was quickly inhabited and developed. Within decades, it was a wealthy royal borough with two MPs, embroiled in accusations of piracy and conspiracy, and in wars against Scotland and France. And then, the storms came. The island was reclaimed by the waters. All this within 130 years.

This is the kind of story you’d expect to know. Especially if you had been the kind of kid who was taken to local historical sites at weekends, and who traipsed around medieval ruins, posing gothically as a teen. But I didn’t. Not until decades later, when I was living on another coast, staring at a different sea, looking for distraction from my career as a historian of modern Britain.

Gathering the fragments

I could tell you that this is a lost history. But that isn’t true. Not quite. Ravenser Odd isn’t well known, even locally. But it does have something of a cult following. A handful of scattered “facts” have coalesced into the outlines of a story, endlessly repeated in obscure blogs, news stories, and “weird history” podcasts. They’ve formed the basis of an ever-growing list of poems, songs, stories, and games.

There is a canon behind this: a collection of weighty tomes by Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian authors who pieced together its fragmented archival traces. But while this isn’t a lost history, it is one which has somehow come to seem lost – or at least to lend itself to being continually refound, always resurfacing.

Thomas Thompson, a retired MP and close friend and business partner of William Wilberforce, was the first to gather the pieces. His 1821 account opens with an image of “the patient Antiquary”, “sit[ting] on the banks of the Humber, and watch[ing] the ebbing of the tide, without being able to discern a blade of grass, where once stood the market-town, and sea-port”.

In the absence of either a physical site, or local memories or legends, Thompson turned to “ancient records, neither numerous, nor generally accessible,” noting that it was only through “a careful collection of scattered facts, that a faint representation can be given of a place which has had no local existence for many generations”. Yet for all its mystery, his search proved so fruitful that he was unable to fit it all into one pamphlet and had to write another.

Over the next century, Thompson’s successors added to his tale........

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