Blog Address

I have removed the custom address for A Yorkshire Memoir and reverted to the original taskerdunham.blogspot.com (instead of taskerdunham.com). If reading this, you are in the right place. 

This is to prevent the blog from becoming inaccessible when the subscription to the custom domain expires. It still has over a year to run, but I have made the change early because custom domains are often bought by others for illicit use. 

Thanks. 

Technical and Other Considerations (for anyone considering doing it themselves) 

Removing the custom address turned out to be easier than anticipated. I thought I would be wrestling with the technicalities of canonical names (cnames) and the like, but that was not the case. 

All I had to do was:

1) Delete the custom domain name in the blog settings. The blogspot.com version of the address worked straight away. The taskerdunham.com address began to be shown as unknown. 

2) I created a completely new blog called "A Yorkshire Memoir (Old Address)" saying what I was doing, and also a note in the title that the address had changed. 

3) Then, on the Old Address blog, I simply added www.taskerdunham.com as the custom domain. Surprisingly, that URL immediately began to redirect to the "Old Address" site. It did not require any change to the cnames on the domain provider's site. It did, however, take a few minutes before the https version of the address became active after I switched it on.

The outcome is that access to taskerdunham.blogspot.com now links straight to the active blog, and access to taskerdunham.com links to the "Old Address" site. I will leave it like that for now as a reminder to those who use that route to change their links.

Please let me know of any problems. 

Internal links within the blog - The blog archive, list of popular posts, etc. changed automatically. Links in blog posts that reference other posts still work correctly so long as they point to a taskerdunham.blogspot.com address, but if they point to taskerdunham.com a message appears saying either that the post does not exist or that the site cannot be accessed at all. It depends on how http/https and www are specified in the link. Fortunately, I have always used the blogspot version within the blog, so don't have to change them. 

External links -  Where others' blog posts or websites have included a link to one of my blog posts, these links now point to the "Old Page" site, i.e. taskerdunham.com, with a page not found message. The same happens with sidebar links on other Blogger blogs until they are updated. 

Google, Bing, and other search indexes - Initially, the results from searches remained unchanged, i.e. they referenced the custom address. Clicking these links led to the "Old Page" site, i.e. taskerdunham.com, with a page not found message. I assume the search indexes will automatically update in due course, but it may take several months. 

I was soon receiving emails from Google to say that pages addressed as the custom domain could not be indexed, and they disappeared from Google search, but the .blogspot.com versions did not appear either. I have tried forcing the issue through the Google Search Console which appears under Crawlers and Indexing in the blog settings, but do not really understand what I am doing. 

Warp Land

The flatland where the River Humber branches into tributaries was once an expanse of permanent marsh. It dried out gradually over the centuries with the construction of river banks and drainage ditches, making agriculture possible. Some areas were improved by a process known as warping.

In warping, river waters are diverted into the fields to deposit layers of fine, fertile silt. It is carried out by building low embankments around the fields and filling them through a breach or sluice in the river bank. The water flows into the fields at high tide, and after being allowed to settle, is drained back as the tide goes out, leaving silt behind. When carried out regularly over two or three years, three feet of silt might be laid down. 

I remember my uncle, the farmer (see Aunty Bina’s Farm), explaining why he preferred certain fields for crops, and others for his “be-asts”. Potatoes, sugar beet, and wheat grew best on warp land, whereas the cattle grazed on pasture. 

I may be mistaken, but looking now on Streetview, I fancy that the line of the low bank around the field followed the line of the lane. The fields were for crops, while the cows grazed behind the house. 

But thinking about it now, it puzzled me. The buildings in the far distance are on the other side of a railway line, and there is a canal beyond that, with the river at the other side of the canal. How could the river water have been diverted into the fields? 

Perhaps the water came from a different river. The River Aire is around two miles to the North behind the camera, and the River Ouse about three miles to the East, but I think these would have been too far, and several main roads, the villages of Rawcliffe and Airmyn, and the town of Goole were in the way. My guess is that the warp water must have come from the river beyond the railway, canal, and buildings - the Dutch River (or River Don). 

Wikipedia provides an answer: “The first reliable report of warping seems to come in the 1730s from Rawcliffe, which is near the confluences of the Ouse with the Aire and the Don, where a small farmer called Barker used the technique.” Neither the railway nor the canal would have been there then. The Knottingley and Goole Canal was opened in 1826, and the Wakefield, Pontefract and Goole section of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway in 1846. The warping must have been done before these dates. Some of the brick outhouses at the farm could easily have dated from that time, and knowledge of the warping would have been passed down by word of mouth. 

The railway, canal, and Dutch River can be seen running parallel in the lower left quarter of this 1962 map (pre-motorway). The oddly straight Dutch River is clearly another man-made feature. It was constructed in the 1630s by Dutch engineers, who diverted the River Don to drain the moors of Hatfield Chase, hence the name “The Dutch River”. The River Don originally flowed further East into the River Trent. Warping of my uncle’s land must have used water from the diverted river Don. 

More extensive warping schemes were carried out in the Nineteenth Century along the original course of the Don, as far East as Adlingfleet on the Trent, and as far South as Crowle. One large area is served by the enormous Swinefleet Warping Drain (centre bottom of map) which runs for 5.6 miles (9 km) and has a permanent sluice into the River Ouse. The drain and much of the network of drainage ditches are deep and wide. Some are stocked with fish for anglers, and all provide habitats for frogs, sticklebacks, water voles, and other wildlife. It is astonishing to think it was all dug out by hand. But, we do not only alter our landscape. Families with Dutch names still live in the area, and the local name for drainage ditches is dykes. 

Swinefleet Warping Drain

Swinefleet Sluice where the warping drain enters the Ouse

Two areas of unreclaimed land remain just to the South: Thorne and Hatfield Moors, which together form the largest expanse of lowland peat bog in the country. Even the intrepid Yorkshire Pudding’s Geograph project has not much ventured there.  

One last piece of trivia. In the film “The Dam Busters” (1955), the aeroplanes are shown flying along a Dutch canal. It was actually filmed flying East along the Dutch River. The Goole shipyard cranes can be seen as the planes approach the River Ouse and then bank left over the town. Please don’t tell the East Riding Council. It will give them ideas about what to do with the place. 

Dave Northsider is now trying to work out how he can divert river water into his polytunnel.