England Washing Away

[Carruthers]

I have farming friends who live just north of Flamborough and a mile or so inland from the coast where the cliffs are over 300' high and they should be OK for a while yet.

I have to say that I don't think that I could live that close to the sea.

It isn't the thought of my garden making its way to the Dutch coast, it's the biting winter winds that would do it for me.

If they're not roaring in from the Arctic then they're straight off the Russian steppe a great deal of the time.

Yesterday's Yorkshire Post carried a substantial article about the problems of coastal erosion as shown here at Skipsea:



Yorkshire Post

Further south on the coast of East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk) the sea is taking its toll at Easton Bavents among many other places.

These pictures show the erosion in 1998, 2009 and 2019.



East Anglian Daily Times

Back to Yorkshire now.

There is no truth to rumors of Commie Submarines causing large waves and rip currents.

However, Ivan did seem to have acquired more than a working knowledge of the Yorkshire coast.

A few miles further up the coast from Flamborough Head there's a cove known as Hayburn Wyke.

It's here that those with less than benevolent intentions would have been landed from Soviet Navy submarines.

Evidence has emerged that during the Cold War, agents from the Soviet KGB were eyeing beautiful Hayburn Wyke with sinister intent.
According to Dave, the Soviet Union was making contingency plans in the event of an invasion of the UK and surveying Hayburn Wyke as a potential landing site.
They called the plan Operation Foot, and when it was exposed in 1971 there was a mass expulsion of Soviet diplomats from London for working covertly as intelligence agents.

The story reads like a John le Carré novel, except that it’s true.

Apparently, Oleg Lyalin, a diplomat working for the Soviet Trade Delegation in Highgate, wished to defect and one of the secrets he revealed was that he had made several visits to Hayburn Wyke.
His job, he explained, was working for a KGB unit specialising in sabotage and covert attacks during periods of crisis or war.
It was his task to select and report on sites that could be used for landing Soviet sabotage groups by sea and air.

The KGB spy’s survey of Hayburn Wyke, eventually exposed by a Cambridge history professor, was well advanced when he defected.
He even backed up his story with a map of where the landings were possible. Chillingly, the KGB planned to form sabotage groups which would “demoralise and terrorise” the civilian population by attacking railways.
It is not recorded, however, whether the spy knew that the nearby Scarborough-Whitby line had closed in 1965.

So the next time people visit Hayburn Wyke, Dave suggests, they should keep an eye out for discarded vodka bottles or watch for submarines offshore.
There might be more than an Arctic skua around.

Country & Coast: Covert history of secluded Yorkshire cove

Tails from the Trail