Qualla: Winestead Drain

Winestead Drain: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom Corser, CC BY-SA 2.0 uk. In January 1839 someone in East Yorkshire described a machine called a Floating Clough. It was made of timber, with serrated wooden projections sticking out sideways and lengthways, and it was meant to clear silt from a country drain that used to be a small river leading to the Humber Estuary. You sank it into the channel at high tide. The outgoing tide caught it and dragged it three miles downstream, scraping the bed and 'dressing the mud on the sides' as it went. It was a piece of brilliant nineteenth-century improvisation in the service of a lost cause. The river was not coming back. Patrington Haven's days as a port were already numbered.

Read more: Winestead Drain on Qualla

Image: Tom Corser | CC BY-SA 2.0 uk

Winestead Drain: The North Channel That Was

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Brown, CC BY-SA 2.0. Until the late 17th century, what is now Winestead Drain was called the North Channel of the Humber, and it was a real arm of the estuary. It separated Sunk Island and Cherry Cobb Sands - then both saltmarshes covered at high tide - from the rest of the South Holderness mainland....

Read more: Winestead Drain on Qualla

Image: David Brown | CC BY-SA 2.0

Winestead Drain: Acts and Cloughs

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Beecroft, CC BY-SA 2.0. Parliament passed Drainage Acts between 1764 and 1807, including the specific Winestead Drainage Act of 1774, trying to manage the slow disaster of a port turning into a swamp. In 1819 the Winestead Level Internal Drainage Board installed a clow, which is a type of sluice gate, a...

Read more: Winestead Drain on Qualla

Image: Andy Beecroft | CC BY-SA 2.0

Winestead Drain: Drinking Water Like Poison

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Glazzard, CC BY-SA 2.0. What followed for the people living along the drain in the mid-19th century was not romantic. The Winestead Level Drainage Board notes for 1862 record that drinking water was poisoned, that animals fell ill from drinking the water, and that the local railway stationmaster describ...

Read more: Winestead Drain on Qualla

Image: Paul Glazzard | CC BY-SA 2.0

Winestead Drain: A Pumping Station and a New Wetland

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mat Fascione, CC BY-SA 2.0. At the river mouth, a pumping station built in 1977 controls the flow between the drain and the tidal Humber, holding back the salt water that would otherwise come in on every tide. It failed during the floods of 26 June 2007 - the river reached 2.42 metres, its highest ever reco...

Read more: Winestead Drain on Qualla

Image: Mat Fascione | CC BY-SA 2.0