In 1706 there had been considerable wrecks of wines on the Manor of Brighthelmston-Lewes; and the then Lord High Admiral claimed them as his right. But Richard Onslow, Esq., and Colonel Tufton, as proprietors of the manor, kept the wines; and on a full investigation of the business at the assizes for the county, in 1708, their conduct, in that particular, was justified, and their manorial right fully established. On the 4th of March, 1818, as Mr. Izard was having excavations made for the foundations of two houses on the West Cliff—now the King’s Road,—between Ship Street and Middle Street, the workmen discovered the walls of one of the streets under the Cliff, which had been overwhelmed by one of the terrible inundations of the sea. They appeared buried more than fifteen feet with beach. In 1713, the sea having destroyed everything below the Cliff, encroached with alarming rapidity on the Cliff itself, fragments of which daily crumbled into the sapping tide. It was therefore found absolutely necessary, for the preservation of the rest of the town, to erect groynes before it. These groynes are contrived by means of strong wooden barriers projecting from the Cliff towards the sea, as far as low-water mark, which intercept and confine the beach or sea shingle, that chiefly rolls from west to east in this part of the English Channel. By these contrivances, a large body of beach, rising gradually towards the Cliff, is accumulated on the western side of every barrier, which resists and breaks the impetuosity of the roughest sea. But the reduced state into which a coincidence of unfavourable circumstances had sunk Brighthelmston, about the beginning of the last century, it was impossible for the inhabitants to raise amongst themselves a sum nearly adequate to so expensive an undertaking. A brief was therefore granted them, under which they collected about £1,700. By means of this public aid, and the internal contributions of the town itself, the Cliff was pretty well secured from the west part, as far as the Old Steine. The groynes eastward of the Steine are comparatively of modern construction, the most important of them being,—in its original state,—that constructed on the suggestion and plan of Mr. Edward Thunder, at Black Rock, about the year 1819, when the sea was rapidly encroaching at that spot and threatening to make inroads upon the whole of the Marine Parade. The barrier was effectual, although on its projection and erection it was called by the shortsighted of the time, “Teddy Thunder’s Folly.” Thunder, who was one of the Town Commissioners at the time, was an eccentric but shrewd man. He was the inventor of the pedal for shifting the keys of the piano-forte.