Hessle put-in

The Humber is Britain's largest macro-tidal estuary, draining a catchment of about 24,472 square kilometres, around a fifth of England's land area, through the Aire, Derwent, Don, Ouse, Trent and Wharfe. At Hessle the water runs deep close to the north bank beneath the bridge, but roughly a third of the estuary dries to mud and sand at low water, and the Hessle Sand channels nearby are subject to rapid change.

Directly overhead is the Humber Bridge, a single-span suspension bridge with a main span of 1,410 metres whose deck stands about 30 metres above high water at springs. It was listed Grade I in July 2017, its Historic England listing describing it as pairing functional engineering with aesthetic quality. On the foreshore beside the slipway stands the Black Mill (Hessle Whiting Mill), an early 19th-century tower windmill that crushed chalk from the adjacent quarry to make whiting; it survives as a scheduled monument and a landmark visible from the water, and the chalk cliffs behind the foreshore are what remains of that quarry.

The estuary is designated SSSI, Special Area of Conservation, Special Protection Area and Ramsar site for its intertidal mudflats and sandflats, saltmarsh, reedbeds and dunes, and it supports internationally important numbers of waterbirds together with grey seal and river and sea lamprey. Its Ramsar citation records a non-breeding waterbird assemblage of 153,934 birds. Dense communities of marine worms, molluscs and other invertebrates live in the intertidal mud and feed that population.