Crumbling Coasts and Shifting Sands
Posted on | August 10, 2009 | 4 Comments
The beaches of England are an odd thing to behold if your only beach experience prior to that time has involved sand. Pebbles — everywhere underfoot the beaches of East Anglia are covered with pebbles instead of the usual tracts of sand and the process of walking out to the water’s edge is a bit more noisy than the relatively quiet crunch of feet on sand.
We lived in Norfolk for a year and our 3rd floor flat was perched high atop a cliff which faced the sea — the relentlessly surging sea.
Archaeology and history are justifiable obsessions in a land as ancient as Britain and the print and online media have always kept the reading public up to date on the latest finds. While living in Hunstanton in the mid-1990s, I read about the many submerged towns that slipped beneath the waves and found one magazine article particularly poignant. It described the eerie sensation that engulfed the author as he sat in a dinghy alongside a fisherman, just at dusk, and heard the sound of the bells in the church tower which was now lying several metres beneath the sea.
This new article in Smithsonian Magazine online, Ancient Cities Lost To The Sea, has made me think of that coastline again. And I followed up by doing a quick search which yielded facts that the Smithsonian article did not. According to the wikipedia entry for Dunwich, the ruins that are sitting at the edge of the sea in our present day were once a full mile inland!
It does tend to make one ponder a particular word — impermanence.
Tags: Dunwich > East Anglea > medieval village > North Sea > submerged village > Suffolk > sunken churches
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Deborah Harmes, Ph.D.
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August 10th, 2009 @ 4:50 AM
Great article – and a reminder that coastal lands continue to erode. Combine potential sea level rise and it certainly is interesting times.
August 10th, 2009 @ 5:02 AM
For reasons just such as this, they are withdrawing already granted planning permission to build in many coastal areas of Australia. Our coastlines have changed quite a bit in the short 7-plus years that we’ve been back here.
Thanks for commenting!
August 10th, 2009 @ 7:39 AM
I have a smooth pebble from the beach in Nice. When you look at it closely you realiize two sides are terracotta and the stripe down the centre is lime mortar. A piece of Roman wall perhaps?
August 10th, 2009 @ 6:11 PM
Love that!