ENGLAND UNDER THE SEA

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4706, 2 June 1924, Page 2

ENGLAND UNDER THE SEA

ACRES YIELDED TO WAVES. it is reported lipm Lowestoft that a oca wail is going aim a million lom> ol beach are gone (says the I'elegiapn). long since, in the neighouurhuud ol householders weie mourning vanished gardens. Tliei 43 - is nuining stable about the shores of our island, and the East Coast his iielded many an acre to the sea. Everyone knows that the Goodwin Sands were once part of the Eaildom ol KtSil. The Yoikoiine port, Rateiispur, at which Henry IV. lauded when lie came to overthrow Richard if., has xong been under water. Duuwich was a Roman town, and once it had a king's palace and a bishop, aud iu the dajs of Henry Hl. it sent forty Miips to the King’s Navy. But for a thousand years the "searching waves have been washing away those sandy Suffolk cliffs, and there is not much left of Dunwich now. A forest lies under the Wash and stretches along the low Lincolnshire coast beneath the sea. It is not only East Anglia which has suffered. When St. Wilfrid came from Northumbria to convert the South Saxons, Selsey Hilt.was twice as large, they gay, as the narrow peninsula where holidaymakers now resort. Wilfrid’s cathedral has tong been under the sea. Three hundred years ago men could make out its walls at low tide. Now there is no trace. In the days of Henry VIII. the anchorage which is still called the Park was a park with deer in it. Men have been excommunicated <>y an irate bishop for poaching there. Pagh.am Harbour, close by, was made six centuries ago, when the sea broke it and drowned thousands of acres. But in the battle between land and water it is not always the land that loses. On the same Sussex coast Rye now stands a mile or two from the sea. which once came up to its walls. Winclielsea was once tiie Portsmouth of England, wheirlhe rock on which it stands was washed by the tides. It is tar from the sea now, though there was an earlier Winclielsea which the sea destroyed. All these changes, and many another, have been made in the short age of written history. If we look back into the legendary past we find the story of the lost land of Lyonese, which lies beneath the blue water between Land's End and the Scillj- Isles.