Through East Anglia in a Motor CarVincent, James Edmund
General
Through East Anglia in a Motor Car
Vincent, James Edmund
Norfolk (England) -- Description and travel; Suffolk (England) -- Description and travel
This same Dunwich is without exception the most depressing scene on which
the eye could rest. Down the hill we swept into a bleak hamlet of some
twenty houses and to an inn, where tea was ordered. What time the ladies
thawed themselves over a new-lit fire it seemed good to the men to restore
circulation, and perhaps stimulate the mind a little, by a tour of
inspection, and to ask for guidance beforehand. It was given in grim
language. "If you want only to see the ruins you can go by the road; if you
want to see the bones you must follow the cliff." So desiring to see
everything as quickly as might be, we took the path to the cliff, through a
sandy cutting, and soon were close to the evidence of a recent fall into
the sea of land, rising perhaps a hundred feet above high-water mark, of
which the most reckless speculator would hardly buy the fee simple for any
tangible sum. It has been falling--sometimes in large pieces, sometimes in
small--since the reign of Edward III; it is falling still, and it will
continue to fall. It is of the kind of substance that has no more cohesion,
or very little more, than a child's castle of sand, which, having been a
broad-based cone in the beginning, has been cut till it opposes a sheer and
perpendicular and crumbling obstacle to the advancing tides. Waves and
rains--the latter far more destructive than is commonly imagined--are
destroying this part of England, even while others are being added to, with
remarkable celerity, nor is it easy to see how any protecting works could,
even if the enterprise were worth undertaking, be constructed with any
reasonable hope of success. The last fall--of part of the churchyard of the
derelict All Saint's--was clearly quite recent. The bones, mixed with
crumbling débris of the rotten cliff, were being washed by muddy wavelets a
hundred feet below the perilous verge of the cliff, a grisly and a
saddening sight. The church itself--its west end still standing--hung on
the edge of the cliff; it cannot last long. "Murray" writes in 1875: "It
might have served till the present day, but was abandoned in the middle of
the last century that the townsfolk might sell the bells and lead." He
would be a bold man who should say now that the townsfolk were not justly
prudent, for it is as plain as a pikestaff that All Saint's is liable at
any moment, hurtling down into the insatiable sea, to join St. Peter's and
the other five churches, once the glory of Dunwich; it has already sent
down half its burial ground, and the rest, although burials continued
after the church was abandoned, is sure to follow soon. Opposite my seat of
a Sunday in Winchester Cathedral when I was a boy, was a sepulchral chest
on top of a screen bearing the legend "In hâc et alterâ e regione cistâ
reliquiæ sunt ossium," and then a handful of kings beginning with Canute
were mentioned. It used to seem reasonably grim. But this shallow and
relentless sea round the last relics of Dunwich, with its bottom strewn by
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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