The Death of a City.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVI, Issue 125, 31 May 1904, Page 4

The Death of a City.

PALACE AND 52 CHURCHES THAT HAVE PERISHED. j A pitiful spectacle may be Been today on the coast of Suffolk. All men have heard of the strange romantic history of Dunwich, that proud city of the east, whose scanty ruins now totter oi> the brink of the cliffs, a fleeting monument of the mutability | of earthly things. | Grim relics of the glorious past, dismembered fragments of the bodies ! of those who were once its proud citizens, now cumber the beach and make playthings for the waves of the North Sea. I found the skull of one of those former residents on the shore the other day (writes a correspondent in the London Chronicle of April Bth). What a heyday Dunwich had ! In centuries long gone by its harbours were filled with shipping, its coffers with gold, and its streets with prosperous citizens, who lorded it over all others in East Anglia. Dunwich was one of the great cities of the early agds of England. The Romans settled there, and in Saxon times it rose to eminence, so that it was made the seat of a bishopric,and for ages afterwards rejoiced in the magnificence of prelatical state. Kings were pleased to smile on it, to make grants of charters and gifts of land, and even to build a regal palace there. Courtiers in the retinue made merry within walls of solid masonry built to defy the assaults of time. Dunwich established a mint, and made its own money ; but it made infinitely more by the far-reaching commerce which drew all ships to its haven, and all the traders of East Anglia to this, their capital. Within the massive walls, pierced Vy gateways of solid brass, there were, as record shows, fifty-two churches and religious houses, and as many great ships and a crowd of small craft held this their port of origin. Before Liverpool, or Glasgow, or Bristol, and their fleets were dreamt of, Dunwich was among the chief ports of England. But those who built.the towns were like the men who built a house upon the sands, fortho winds blew and the waves beat upon it and it fell. To-day nothing of tho glory and the greatness, little even of the town, remains. The harbour, the ships, the streets, the churches, the palaces, the walls of stone and the gates of brass, all have gone. VICTORIOUS SEA.

For the low clifTa of which the town stood were composed of loam and sand, and the oceun was hungry and made a yearly meal of them. Centuries ago the danger was seen, but nothing could avert it. The seaward [jart of the town was sw illowecl up bit by bit by the ruthless waves, street after street vanished : a wood which flourished south of the town was submerged, and long after the trunks were exposed to low tide. Piers were built in despair, to save the harbour, but they, too, were but mouthfuls for the sea. Surely but slowly the material monuments of the glory of Dunwich were taken. To-day, what remains ? Approaching from the north on the fringe of forlorn marshes where the heron rises, disputing the traveller's rights to intrude, and a solitary windmill whirls its flapping arms in the boisterous wind, or from the west over a glorious heath rolling like the sea, is a mere cluster of modern houses on the landward side of the cliff which there descends to the fen-like flats. A church built well inland in the last century, with radiant primroses in profusion now decking its green graves ; and a little street of pleasant gardened dwellings. This is the Dunwich of today. But up on the height above there stands the ruined walls of a Franciscan priory, founded in the twelfth century, with two fine ivy-clad gateways. Within the great walled space is a little farmstead, and a well-grown pig greeted me with a grunt of indifference when I looked round. Beyond is the ruin of the ancient church of All Saints, which once stood a mile or more away from the ocean, and now tottering on the edge of the crumbling cliff. Trippers may sport on the old graveyard ; but the wind and waves make great sport of All Saints. Year by year a slice is swept away. There is a field by its side, ploughed and sown, but it is twentyeight yards narrower than when ir was ploughed last year ; the good land has gone into the hungry maw of the sea.

On tho beach below one sees the method of havoc. There is a ledge of sand and shingle, but at high tide the waves override it, and gnaw at the soft bottom of tire sandy cliff. Then a slip occurs, and away comes another part of the foundation of Dunwich'a greatness. DEVASTATED GRAVES. A slip had lately taken place when I was there the other morning. The earth was fresh, and black, huge blocks of the old masonry had tumbled with it, and the end of the chancel wall seraned to hang over above, as though its hour had tome. But from the black earth and yellow sand gaunt bones protruded—not one but dozens. Every time the earth falls a tomb opens, anil its grisly contents are precipitated on the beach. I counted a scoro of fragments of human limbs, there a thigh bone, there part of a pelvis and there, perched on a mound of earth and masonry, a brown, toothloss skull, the sockets where the eyes had been staring out on the restless waters. For hundreds of years past the

graveyards of Dunwich have been casting forth their dead, and the tale is not yet told. In the village I learned that the trippers from the towns near by hunt in the debris, and carry off the bones of the disturbed bodies as trophies of their excursion. Thip ghastly pillage is not restricted, for no one seems to deem it his duty to gather the remnants of mortality and decently re-inter them. The sea alone, in its own time, gives them sepulture. Have the few remaining citizens of Duhwich no care for the men who fought that ceaseless flght with the ocean, that they let their bones strew the sands unhonoured to make trophies for trippers ? Apparently not. They wntch the waves and wonder. "Tho sea will have it," they say. "This bit o' cliff was out there six years ago, sixty or seventy yards away ; sin' Christinas it has gone from where , the shingle is to here." The ruins of a brick foundation hang at the edge, and some of them lie in the sand-pools. "That was a boalhouse last season," they say. No effort is made to arrest the ravages; the landowner does not move. "May be the Government will, when it's all gone," they add, and turn away. This is the end of Dunwich. A trembling ruin, a despoiled burialyard, and tho bones on the beach. And the sea is wailing and gaping , for these.