The settlement of Nunburnholme is recorded in William I’s Domesday survey of 1086, entered under the hundred of Warter in Yorkshire.

Other Settlements in Warter

The Meaning of the Name

The name Nunburnholme is of Scandinavian origin. Its final element derives from the Old Norse word holmr, an island or patch of raised ground in marsh. The first element is most likely a personal name or an early descriptive term, now difficult to recover with certainty. Taken together the name probably meant something close to ‘a island’.

Names of this type are a fingerprint of Scandinavian settlement: they cluster across the old Danelaw, where Norse-speaking settlers renamed or founded villages from the late 9th century onward.

Remarkably, the name has changed little since 1086, when the Domesday scribes wrote it as Nunburnholme.

Listed Buildings Near Nunburnholme

Historic England records 1 listed building within about a mile of Nunburnholme. Listing protects structures of special architectural or historic interest, graded I (exceptional), II* (particularly important) and II.

Grade I

Church of Saint James - 0.36 km

Scheduled Monuments Near Nunburnholme

Scheduled monuments are nationally important archaeological sites given legal protection. 2 lie within roughly a mile of Nunburnholme:

Site of Nunburnholme Priory - 1.18 km
Cleaving Hall moated site - 1.58 km

Nunburnholme Today

Today Nunburnholme lies within the administrative area of East Riding of Yorkshire, and the settlement recorded a population of 255 at the 2021 census. Nine and a half centuries separate that figure from the small rural community the Domesday survey recorded here in 1086.

Read more about modern Nunburnholme on Wikipedia .