EROSION BY SEA

Evening Star, Issue 23381, 26 September 1939, Page 8

EROSION BY SEA

VILLAGES UNDER WATER IN BRITAIN SAND COVERS TOWNS A few weeks ago men were fighting a forest fire at Ciilbin 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 (says a writer in the ‘ Observer,’ London). Since 1912, a representative of the ‘ Observer ’ was told, the Forestry Commission has attempted to stem the sand bv tree planting, by layers of brushwood faggots, and by the planting of marram grass. Even when there is no wind the sand can be seen to move continually, and sometimes ns much as 20 years’ growth of trees is completely covered.

The coastal map of Britain has changed considerably during the past three or four centuries. There are towns beneath the 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. ■lt 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. BEATEN INTO RUINS. The list is headed by “ mighty Dunwich,” nursery of the Christian faith in Eastern England. Dunwich “ 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 but finished its work 200 years ago, in the winter of 1739. A great forest once extended southeastward from Dunwich for seven miles. This has lain under the waves for centuries; its last remnants were seen during the storm that ended the history of the town.

Shipden, near Cromer (from which Robert Bacon sailed to discover Ice-

land), was engulfed in the reign of Henry IV. Early in the sixteenth century ' the sea devastated the famous Humber port of llavenspur, “ fatal Itavenspore,” 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. UNDER WATER. Down in the south old Winchelsea in Sussex went in 1287, when the sea rose and “ all the land lay under the water lost.” One looks in vain for the famous Kentish town of Reculver, 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 Lyonnesse is said to lie buried off the Cornish coast. Some claim that the Scillies are its “ sunset bound,” but it is doubtful if we shall ever know the truth.

To-day the coast of East Anglia is the saddest of the drowned lands of Britain. Churches and houses, wharves and fields and forests—East Anglia knows what it has lost. A place where corn was reaped early in the present century is now a mile from land. For hundreds of years the North Sea has been encroaching; winter by winter it adds to its spoils in spite of all the resistance man can make.