IS BRITAIN DISAPPEARNG?

Shannon News, 13 April 1926, Page 1

IS BRITAIN DISAPPEARNG?

NEPTUNE TAKES HIS TOLL. The question at [the top of this column is not a joke; Engineers and scientists are really alarmed at the erosion which is going on all round the shores of Great Britain, and, serious discussions are taking place as to ways and means of dealing with Neptune’s menace. At the present time erosion is taking place to an alarming extent all along the South Coast. Hundreds of millions of tone of shingle have been carried out to sea .though ijt is only occasionally, when voracious Neptune takes* an extra large mouthful, that attention is called to disappearing . Britain. Neptune is not particular as fo where he bites. Right around the coast from Durham, down the coast of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Essex Sussex Kent and up the Western coast to Cheshire and ' Lancasire, the erosion goes on. No one knows where .'the land goes ,or why. At some places (writes an English journalist) the erosion is so rapid as to be startling. Fifteen years ago I stood in an old church on the cliffs in Dunwich, in Suffolk. At my back was the tower; in front of me the nave, ...150 feet or more long, stretched down to the very brink of the cliffs This was the last of the churches of Dunwich, the once great city which has been swallowed by the i Every bit of the church had gone over the cliffs into the sea. Lady chapel, nave, and even .'the tower had disappears, together with the land, on which they had stood. On the Sussex coast thej sea has been playing “put and take” for centuries. At modern Winchelsea, for many years the sea has been receding This means that ,ait thies point, Sussex is actually being enlarged; but the sea has not receded far enough to uncover even a part of what was once one of the chief cities of England. Old Winchelsea reached the zenith of its fame in the reign of King John, when ijt was chief of the Cinque ports. At the height of its glory Neptune demanded its! surrender. A succession of terrific storms assailed it, and in 1236 a great flood ocurred. An old chronclo relates: “The sea forced contrary to its natural course flowed twice without ebbing, yielding such a roaring that the same was heard (not without great wonder) a far distance from : the shore. . beside other hurt that was done in bridges, mills breaks and banks there were 300 houses and some churches drowned with the high rising of the water course.” After this, no year went by without the sea taking toll of the town ,and in 12 S 7 came the climax. So great and sudden was the onslaught of the sea in ithis year that the citizens had to flee for the lives. Here is an entry of the panic-stricken Clerk of Rye: “On the 2nd of the month of February the sea in the Isle of Thanet swelled and rose so high that it burst all the walls and drowned all the grounds ;so thait from the great wall of Appledore, as far as Winchesley towards the south and west, all the land lay under the water lost.” On ancient Winchelsea not a vestige remains. Streets, shops, churches, lie buried fathoms deep ,in the sea. A similar tale of the sea’s ravages might be told all round Great Britain’s coasts.