Ravenser Odd, the sunken medieval island that continues to inspire and obsess

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 – using collections of printed documents and sources held at the newly-opened Public Record Office. The best known of these texts, J.R. Boyle’s Lost Towns of the Humber and Thomas Sheppard’s Lost Towns of the Yorkshire Coast, are still key reference points. Their flourishes, speculations, and suppositions have become inextricably part of the island’s lore.

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But even the archival sources are extraordinary. I team up with medieval expert, Kathryn Maude, of The National Archives, who traces the records of this upstart new town. She finds customs accounts detailing trading relations with Scandinavia, the Low Countries, the Baltic – and the complaints that follow when things turn sour: theft; extortion; murder. Closer to home, Ravenser Odd was accused of intercepting ships heading for Grimsby and impoverishing its neighbours.

Most striking are the records of its physical structures – and the sheer size of the town they suggest. Along with the docks, court, prison, chapel, goldsmiths, and tannery, Kathryn uncovers records of three windmills and hundreds of houses.

The year after two thirds of the town was annihilated by storms, a further 145 houses (seemingly belonging to a single woman) were destroyed, along with many other buildings and 42 plots of land. This is more than a lost village. Its trace has been left on numerous world maps of the time.

Yet, despite all this, I am still unable to answer one of the biggest mysteries of all: where exactly was Ravenser Odd?

When we finally get to Spurn Point (without my parents), I realise I don’t know where I should be looking. Was it out in the North Sea, or within the estuary? How far away? The earliest sources say a mile out to sea; others that it was joined to the mainland by a sandy road. Since 2013 the end of the peninsula has become a tidal island. Maybe the same thing happened back then in reverse. When land first appeared perhaps it looked like a “true island”, which “the sea surrounds”, but over time more of the peninsula emerged. In any case, the point itself has moved, drifted, extended over the centuries. The sandbanks, mudflats, and saltmarshes appear and disappear with the tides.

I’d assumed that once I got here, I’d feel it somehow. I’d know. But the idea of a busy, noisy port in this isolated landscape seems impossible, unfathomable. We content ourselves with a seal, a deer, and a full array of wading birds.

In the months before our trip, a team of geographers from the University of Hull started looking for Ravenser Odd. Their hi-tech scans of the seabed led to media claims that “Yorkshire’s Atlantis” would soon be found. Five years later, there is still nothing to see.

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Ravenser Odd: the medieval city Yorkshire lost to the sea

The wonder of being lost

But something is definitely happening. The handful of blogs, pamphlets, and a couple of songs, have multiplied. Every time I search, I find more – more songs, more poems, more podcasts, more novels and short stories and plays. The most recent have an element of AI-assistance. I start collecting these works, talking to their creators, asking what brought you to this story? What does it mean to you?

A lawless place, unmapped, untamed –
some boats that sprawled to make a town:
illustrious and briefly famed.

But sand ran through. The sky dropped down.
The waves stood up and raised their voice
until there was no other sound.

– Extract from “Ravenser Odd” by Michael Daniels

And I find it is the lostness that matters. Ravenser Odd cannot be visited and that gives it a poetic element, an allure, a hauntingness. A musician describes the fact that “on the maps it keeps moving” as “really magical”, it makes it feel “almost not real”. A poet says: “The fact that it is unstable, that you can’t pin it down, to me is the wonder”.

While most of the people I speak to are local, only a few knew the story as children, most came to it in later life. Like me – and my parents – they were intrigued that they had never heard of it before. Others are from further afield: London, Scotland, Ireland, the United States, Ukraine. Surprisingly few have seen the media coverage of the physical search for the island; surprisingly many have stumbled across Boyle’s and Shepherd’s books in libraries or online booksellers.

Lots of these creators find Ravenser Odd because they are looking for it – or rather for this type of story, set in this kind of place. They search “lost coastal Yorkshire village”, or “sunken English island”. And this is what they find. It satisfies a narrative need. Partly, Ravenser Odd is standing in for all lost settlements, all drowned landscapes. Interviewees frequently mentioned their interest in other lost places: mythical and real; ancient and modern; local and international. But it also offers something new. An American role-playing games designer describes Ravenser Odd as “memetically sticky”, but with “its own weird details”: like Dunwich (a thriving medieval port city in Suffolk, England, that largely vanished into the North Sea because of coastal erosion) with added – if historically ambiguous – Viking influences.

The main difference is its obscurity, although that is a shrinking resource. A video artist tells me how shocked she is by the sheer quantity of internet sources now available – a stark contrast to 2006, when she last looked. A songwriter who found the story in 2025 was disconcerted to discover she was not the first, that it was already ‘trendy’. And yet, she found she couldn’t give it up – and “just got drawn in deeper and deeper.”

A very odd name

She was not the only one to get hooked or to find it had got under her skin. As one novelist put it: “I immediately saw it and thought, well, that is fascinating, and it is odd that I’ve never heard of it before, and I haven’t actually stopped thinking about it since.”

Her reference to it being odd is telling. The strange name of the island is a key part of its appeal. One creator explained his inspiration came from a search for lost local places, “and seeing those words, ‘Ravenser Odd’, and that being odd in itself”.

JR Boyle suggested that the name was Viking, meaning “Raven’s Tongue”, and that has stuck – although the medieval spellings are too variable to be sure of anything, and its 13th-century emergence seems rather late for that. Other key aspects of Ravenser Odd’s popular mystique are similarly ambiguous. Although it was repeatedly accused of piracy, this was common to many of its neighbours; part of a medieval economy of complaint and recompense.

The reason we don’t remember Hull or Grimsby as notorious pirate havens is because they went on to have other lives. Yet already in 1400, Ravenser Odd’s story could be wrapped up with a dramatic moral conclusion. In the retrospective account of the Chronicle of Meaux Abbey – a monastery which had itself lost land on the island – “by its wicked works and piracies, [Ravenser Odd] provoked the wrath of God against itself beyond measure”.

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As a historian of public heritage, I initially approached this as an example of what academics call popular medievalism. But it soon became clear that this is one of the least important aspects of its appeal. Only a handful of writers were drawn to it because it is a medieval story; for most a generic sense of pastness and unspecified authenticity is enough.

Instead of historical period, I find that it’s really the location that matters. Geographers are interested in what the island’s position reveals about longshore drift, whereby sediment is moved along the coastline, forming new land formations. Locals complain that it has been forgotten because it’s in a neglected part of the north. And Spurn Point has its own allure. Interviewees described being startled and staggered by the idea that “such a tiny little place on the end of nowhere”, a desolate place, had been “a port that kings used” or could have once been “this enormous place with half a dozen churches, or more.” In truth, it seems that Ravenser Odd only had one church, but the exaggeration is telling in itself; the unimaginability of a place like that in a landscape like this.

It also turns out that my dad was onto something. Spurn Point is indeed a heck of a way from most places. And that matters too. A local historian tells me that it is much further away than you think it’s going to be and that “you’ve really got to be alert because it’s so neglected often you can’t see the road markings”. Even when you reach the peninsula, the point itself is still some distance, with no remaining road.

Having walked with my family as far as the lighthouse and back, I leave them to eat cakes in the visitor centre, while I hire a bike in a panic to take me on the eight-mile round trip to the very end of the land. We’ve come all this way and I need to get there and back before the tide cuts it off. I soon regret this. A bike is not an ideal form of transport on sand, and I end up pushing more than riding, with the rain setting in as I struggle up and down the bramble-covered hillocks before the final point.

But, in the words of a local folk musician: “Once you do it and you get past the kind of grass scrubland onto that final beach, I mean it’s just because you’re there on your own … It’s just stunning. It’s brilliant … I think that adds as well to the Ravenser Odd sense of being magical”.

I breathe in the salt air, look across the estuary at (the medieval-inspired) Grimsby Dock Tower, and out at the windfarms on the horizon. And I wonder what would be lost if this story were to be fully found, if it became a well-known history of a mapped-out place. Without its mysteries would Ravenser Odd still astound and intrigue? Would it still allow us to wonder?