Ravenser Odd through the ages

Ravenser Odd, also spelled Ravensrodd, stood on the sandbanks at the mouth of the Humber estuary, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The name Ravenser comes from the Old Norse Hrafn's Eyr, 'Raven's Ear', for the sandbank promontory that carried it; the modern successor of that lost promontory is Spurn Point. The Count of Aumale founded the town in the middle of the thirteenth century, on ground the estuary itself had thrown up.

The town lived off the shipping that passed its mouth. It kept wharves and warehouses, a court and a prison, and collected dues from more than a hundred merchant ships a year. In the thirteenth century it was a more important port than Kingston upon Hull, further up the Humber.

It sent two members to the Model Parliament of 1295, and by 1 April 1299, when it was granted a borough charter, it had more than a hundred houses and a flourishing market.

As the sandbanks shifted, the town began to be swept away. The king granted the townsmen quayage, funds to repair their damaged quay, in 1329, and again in 1333, 1335, 1340, 1344 and 1347. The repairs did not hold. An inquisition held in 1346 found the ongoing flood damage so severe that only a third of the townsfolk remained.

Storms over the winter of 1356–57 flooded the town completely, and it was abandoned. What was left of it was largely destroyed by the storm known as the Grote Mandrenke, or Saint Marcellus's flood, in January 1362.

The site is now completely underwater. In 2022 it was being searched for off Spurn Point, in the hope that the foundations of the seawall and the harbour would still be there to find.