Our good friend Nick Quantrill of Hull Noir tell us about some of his favourite authors. Can there be any better recommendations?

It’s a fair question and one which only* Hull Tour Guide Paul Schofield can answer.

*Other people can answer this question but we’re trying to build Paul’s confidence up.

A question asked by Florence of HU10 which may have a more surprising answer than you might expect.

There is some evidence to support the theory, so we sent our medieval structures correspondent Angus Young to have a poke around.

Roughly a mile from the edge of Bransholme and just over two miles from the village of Swine, a tree-covered mound overlooks pancake-flat fields. Mystery surrounds exactly when this man-made raised earthwork was first constructed. Some say it might have been a small Roman outpost, others point to the similarity with the much larger site of Skipsea Castle which is now thought to date back 2,500 to the Iron Age.

What is known through historical documentation is that a castle is first recorded as standing on the oval mound in 1292. However, it wouldn’t have been a huge castle with ramparts, high stone walls and turrets. Instead, the main building would have almost certainly been made from timber and was probably no larger than a modern day detached house.

The mound would also have featured a cluster of adjoining smaller timber buildings including stables, stores, workshops and a small chapel along with accommodation for the servants of whoever lived there. Circled by a timber fence, the mound was also protected by a moat or ditch which can still be traced today on aerial images of the site. The surrounding land was not drained until the later Medieval period so the castle would have sat on an island overlooking marshland.

Its location was no accident either as it lies next to Holderness Drain. Although the drain itself was built in the late 18th century, it replaced a more natural watercourse which provided a key transport route through the swampland – the ancient equivalent of the A63.

A digital reconstruction of how the castle may have looked in this period can now be seen on a new information board installed at the site courtesy of Benedict Dyson, a masters student in digital archaeology at York University who was recently commissioned by the Environment Agency as part of a major flood alleviation project on the surrounding land. The same project has added extra protection in the form of metal kissing gates aimed at restricting access to motorbikes.

Unusually for a Scheduled Ancient Monument, no archaeological excavation has ever been carried out there although amateur treasure hunters have reported numerous finds in nearby fields over the years. The first recorded castle resident is Sir John de Sutton who in 1352 was charged with having built “a castle, crenelated and battlemented at Bransholme, in which (the) castle and houses are one and the same tenement”. The charge was the equivalent of building something today without planning permission but, after some lobbying and the payment of a fine, a licence was granted by King Edward III along with a Royal pardon. It’s likely Sir John’s castle was built as a status symbol rather than for any military or defensive purpose, replacing the previous timber structures with something more robust.

What happened to the castle is not really known. Ownership passed down the family line for a few generations but references to it dry up in local history books to the point where the site eventually becomes known as Mansion Hill, suggesting a large country residence rather than a castle. Even the date when it was last used for human habitation is not known. There’s no surviving stonework above ground, just an overgrown hill and a few trees.

Even so, it’s worth a walk along Castlehill Road out into the open countryside just to soak up the atmosphere of an ancient site right on the city’s doorstep and imagine a time when someone actually called it home.

Angus Young

Hull Musician Chris Speck selects the street in the city that means the most to him. We suspect plenty will agree.

Don’t worry, it isn’t some sort of weird sport. It’s far nicer. Amy Thompson went to East Park Library to for a cuteness overload.

As it’s Charlie’s birthday, we asked our royal correspondent Angus Young to work out which bits of his land we’re traipsing round on.

As the town where King Charles I was famously refused entry and told to sling his royal hook, it’s perhaps not surprising that his current namesake has little direct interest in Hull. However, through the Crown Estate King Charles III does have a hefty stake in the immediate surrounding area.

Technically, the assets of the Crown Estate are classed as hereditary possessions of the sovereign for the duration of their reign which are ‘held in the right of the Crown’. They range from agricultural land and forests to shopping centres and most of Regent Street in central London. Under the rules, a king or queen cannot sell them off or pocket all revenues raised from the assets. The estate isn’t fully controlled by the monarch either. Instead, it’s run by a semi-independent public body overseen by a board of commissioners with profits being split between the government and the monarch under what is known as the sovereign grant mechanism.

Accounts recently published for last year show the latest annual grant heading to the palace rising to £132m, up from £86m. This increase in profits has been attributed to the Crown’s ownership of most of the UK’s seabed stretching 12 nautical miles from the mainland and its vested rights to explore and use natural resources of the continental shelf which extends to 200 miles off the coast. Historically, the 12-mile boundary line was designed to determine jurisdiction over shipwrecks and the occasional washed-up whale. These days, the boom in offshore wind farms is boosting profits like never before. Worth remembering the next time you visit Bridlington, Hornsea or Withernsea and look out at those wind farms on the horizon. It’s not just the inland waters of the North Sea that keep a few bob coming into the Royal purse from this neck of the woods..

Most of the bed and foreshore of the Humber estuary is also owned by the Crown Estate, albeit currently leased to Associated British Ports on a 999-year term agreed back in1869. As such, developments such as the construction of the Humber Bridge and the recent extension of Alexandra Dock in Hull have both required Crown Estate approval. 

The ancient royal claim on the estuary also means one of the Crown’s most unusual landholdings is the aptly named Sunk Island, an isolated chunk of mainly agricultural land in Holderness which was once part of a sandbank in the middle of the Humber. Today it’s no longer an island but a parish in its own right and home to 228 people scattered across just over 9,000 acres with the main cluster of properties around a mile from the foreshore.

Further north there’s another slab of Crown Estate land in Holderness. Back in 1866 the Crown bought 2,166 acres of land in the ancient parish of Swine from the Earl of Shaftesbury whose family had owned a significant part of it since the early 17th century. The £120,000 deal included the Earl’s inherited manor and ten farms and was part of a series of acquisitions by the Crown involving nearby land at Benningholme, Oubrough and Dowthorpe. After the purchase, the Crown embarked on a building programme in Swine with most of the current village and a number of surviving outlying farms dating from this period. It also built a new school which was used for exactly100 years until its closure in 1968 and a sewage disposal works eventually adopted by the local council in 1967,

Similar Crown-owned estates in East Yorkshire include Garton on the Wolds, Sutton-upon- Derwent and Gardham near Cherry Burton.

Angus Young

It’s a rumour that’s been spread by historians (and even a certain art gallery) for many years, but our Urban Mythbuster Amy Thompson and City Archivist Martin Taylor get to the truth in the hull History Center.

Hull Tour Guide Paul Schofield tells the tale of the untimely death of famous actor Arthur Lucan. Who was better known as someone very different.

Olly of HU9 asked this question so we got our trusty tape measure out and got him the best answer we could.