If my first day on the Holderness coast was odd, the second was utterly bizarre. In the early morning the coast was blanketed in a sea fog – or “fret” as they call it locally – and the dwellings along the cliff edge, which I got to see now from behind, were ramshackle, winnowed out by the gulf opening up in their former front gardens. And yet still people hung on here, despite the void encroaching beneath their feet. I headed south towards Hornsea, and passed through leisure park after leisure park, each one full of “static” (ha!) homes.

I stopped to talk to one of these modern-day Canutes, a stocky man in a white singlet who was drinking a cup of tea on the tiny balcony of his caravan. I asked him if he was worried about the encroaching gulf, but he was blithe: “When it gets too near they oop and move us back a few rows, like,” he explained. “But we’ve 46 feet between uz and the cliff – there’s a chap in the next park along, he’s only 12, and his van i’nt even chained!” He shook his head at the idea of such folly then pointed out an embayment in the cliff between two promontories. “See there, I reckon that’ll be next to go, bit in ‘t middle went a few days ago.”

At Hornsea, snug behind its sea defences, I left the cliffs. All the inhabitants of the villages and towns along the Holderness coast believe that one settlement’s defences – concrete bastions, steel groynes and floodgates – mean the next one along will be still more severely gouged. Certainly, as I trudged on I couldn’t see much in the way of a beach until I reached Mappleton and descended into another world.

Read the full article by Will Self on the Independent website