DROWNED LANDS

Evening Star, Issue 23372, 15 September 1939, Page 11

DROWNED LANDS

LOST BRITISH ACRES A few weeks ago men were fighting a forest fire at Culbin on the south of the Moray Firth. This forest was planted on shifting sand, which blew inland two centuries ago and covered the whole of the district. Since 1912, a representative of the ‘ Observer ’ was told, the Forestry Commission has attempted to stem tho sand by tree planting, by layers of brushwood faggots, and by the planting of marram grass. Even when there is no wind the sand can he seen to move continually, and sbmetimes as much as 20 years’ growth-of trees is completely covered. The coastal map of Britain has changed considerably during the last three or four centuries. There are towns beneath tho sea as well as villages beneath the sand. Cartographers know how more and more land yields to the waves, and in East Anglia people are accustomed to disaster—dunes overwhelmed, cliffs crumbling into the North Sea like porridge sliding from a plate. It is not all a tale of loss. There are places around the Wash, for instance, on the south coast, in Somerset, and in Lancashire where the tide is receding and land is gained to balance the erosion elsewhere. But one thinks first of the long roll-call of England’s drowned ports and cities. The list is headed by “ mighty Dunwich,” nursery of the Christian faith in Eastern England. Dumvich, “ surrounded with a stone wall and brazen gates,” had 52 churches, chapels, religious houses, and hospitals; a king’s palace, a bishop’s seat, a mayor’s mansion, and a mint. The sea, which' attacked the city through four centuries and beat it into ruins, all hut finished its work 200 years ago, in the 'winter of 1739.

A great forest once extended southeastwards from Dumvich for seven miles. This has lain under the waves for centuries; its last remains were seen during the storm that ended the history of the town. Shipden, near Cromer (from which Robert Bacon sailed to discover Iceland), was engulfed in the reign of Henry IV. Early in the sixteenth century the sea devastated the famous Huber port of Ravenspur, “ fatal Ravenspore,” where Henry Bolingbroke landed to take the crown from Richard 11. The neighbouring Ravensrodd had gone long before; in all 15 towns of Holderness have perished. Down in the south, old Winchclsea in Sussex went in 1257 when the sea rose and “ all the laud lay under the water lost.” One looks in Vain for the famous Kentish town of Reculvor, for the Essex port of Orwell, and—on the other side of the country—for the Welsh city of Caer Wyddnod, swept under the creaming tides of Cardigan Bay 1,400 years ago.

In the Far West the land of Lyoncsse is said to lie buried off the Cornish coast. Some claim that the Scillies arc its “ sunset hound,” but it is doubtful if wo shall ever know the truth.

To-day the coast of East Auglia is the saddest of the drowned lands of Britain. Churches ami houses, wharves, and fields and forests—East Anglia knows what it has lost. A place whore corn was reaped early in the present century is now a mile from land.

For hundreds of years the North Sea has been encroaching. AVintcr by winter it adds to its spoils in spite of all the resistance man can make.