Sunk Island is located on the north bank of the Humber estuary and 2 miles to the south of the village of Otteringham in East Yorkshire. It is owned by the Crown Estate.
Sunk Island started life as a sand bank, which appeared in the late 16th century. By the mid 17th century the sandbank was 7 acres in size. It was claimed as crown property and leased to Colonel Anthony Gilby, who died in 1682. He started the process of reclaiming it from the sea. His descendants continued the process of embanking and draining and by 1850 the island had an area of 5000 acres. The current area of Sunk Island is 4,575 hectares (11,305 acres). Nowhere on Sunk Island is more than 4 metres above sea level.
Sunk Island is no longer a true island. Until the late 17th century it was separated from the mainland of East Yorkshire by the North Channel. Then the western end of the North Channel silted up and the lack of flowing water caused the North Channel to silt up even more. The Winestead Drain is a river, which has its source near Withernsea and flows into the North Channel a mile to the west of Patrington Haven. In 1819 the Winestead Internal Drainage Board installed a sluice on the North Channel and the eastern part of the North Channel was renamed the Winestead Drain.
At the time of the 2021 census the population of Sunk Island was 221. The houses and farms are scattered around the island. Many of the cottage and farmhouses were designed by the architect Samuel Sanders Teulon and were built 1855-57. The land is almost all in use for growing arable crops.
The Church of the Holy Trinity is located in the middle of the island and adjacent to the old school, postbox and telephone box. The red brick church was built 1876-7 by Ewan Christian. It was declared redundant c1983 and is now used as a heritage centre.
In 1908 Stanley Duncan (1878-1954) founded the Wildfowlers Association of Great Britain and Ireland (WAGBI) at the "Black Hut, which was located close to Outstray Farm at the east end of Sunk Island by Winestead Drain. In 1981 WAGBI became the British Association for Sport and Conservation (BASC). In 1994 a monument to Stanley Duncan was erected at the end of the public road next to Outstray Farm by the Hull and East Riding Wildfowlers Association and the Holderness and Humber Wildfowlers Association.
There is a Greenwich meridian marker located on the sea wall just over half a mile south of Outstray Farm. It was erected in 1984, but was moved 130 metres north when the sea wall was realigned in 2006 to create a 54 hectare intertidal wildlife site to compensate for the loss of habitats, due to the increase in size of the ports of Hull and Immingham.
There is a Ground Control Interception (GCI) radar station on the opposite side of the road to Bleak House Farm Cottages half a mile south west of Patrington Haven. This was built as part of RAF Patrington during the Second World War (c1942) to detect, locate and track enemy aircraft. It has a stand-by set house and a large operations block, which was known as the Happidrome. The domestic accommodation for RAF Patrington was at Patrington Haven on the north side of Winestead Drain. The radar station was in use until 1955.
