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 the contents of six churchyards and a half, is to the chest at Winchester as the earthquakes at San Francisco and Valparaiso are to the slipping of an Irish bog. The scene is depressing, unspeakably sad; but it is necessary to visit it in order to realize that Dunwich was once great and to understand its fall, for it is falling still, and it will go on falling; and you cannot help seeing how it all happened.
Hardly anywhere else, perhaps nowhere, is it possible at once to localize and to realize so long and unvarying a story of progressive ruin. Felix, whom we have met before on these wanderings, landed at Dunwich (another legend lands him shipwrecked at Hunstanton) in the seventh century, on his evangelizing mission; doubtless because King Sigeberht of East Anglia prescribed a landing at the principal port of his kingdom. He found there a flourishing community, a port which, for the seventh century, was large, and, says "Murray," remains of a considerable Roman settlement. (But, for reasons already given and of universal application in East Anglia, I am shy of accepting Roman remains unless they be supported by definite and satisfactory evidence.) At any rate the King built himself a palace, and the saint built a church, the cathedral church of the new diocese of East Anglia; and whether both or either used the Roman ruins no man may tell with certainty, for the sea has devoured palace and cathedral church alike. Perhaps, after all, it does not much matter now of what material they were constructed, or what its origin was. Fifteen successive bishops, at any rate, ruled East Anglia ecclesiastically from Dunwich. So early as Domesday there are records of falls; there is even a legend of an extensive forest, flourishing east of the town that way, covering miles of land over which now the "waves wap and the waters wan." Still Dunwich found forty ships for Henry III, and though "rage and surgies of the sea" ravaged it in the time of Edward III, it occurs in a quaint list of East Anglia's contribution to the fleet raised against the Armada, a list which may be given here once and for all:
Colchester, 1 shippe.
Ipswich and Harwich, 2 shippes, 1 pinnace.
Alborough, Orforth, and Dunwich, 1 shippe.
Yearmouth and Leistocke (Lowestoft), 1 shippe, 1 pinnace.
Lynne and Blackney, 2 shippes, 1 pinnace.
In the time of Leland the bitter cry of the people of Dunwich was heard in the land and the legend of the submerged forest of Eastwood is found on his pages: "George Ferras told me that the men of Dunewich desiring Sucour for their Town againe Rages of the Se, adfirme that a great Peace of a Foreste sumtyme therby ys devourid up and turnid to the use of the Se." Who George Ferras was, this deponent knoweth not, but by way of exemplifying the difficulty of reading Leland, it may be mentioned that other places named on the same folio are New-Windelesore (Windsor), Saresbyri (Salisbury), Dovar, to say nothing of Edward III, Egidius, Walterus de la Ville, Nicholas de S. Quintius, and "Mr. Balthazar," all in the space of twenty-five lines of print. Leland's volumes, through no fault of his, as has been pointed out before, are like conglomerate or puddingstone, with here and there a gem, which takes a great deal of finding. Indeed that this particular gem was found may be attributed to fortune. It shows us Dunwich, before the untiring sea had reduced the inhabitants to absolute despair, crying out for help, and crying to deaf ears. Its destruction, in truth, was very gradual, very certain; and, while the nation would not help, it was not worth while for the people to show the indomitable spirit of those in San Francisco to-day, or to set about the task of rebuilding, for in destroying Dunwich the sea wiped out its excuse for existence, making the land that was left unapproachable by reason of its girdle of shallow water. So there is nothing left but memories, a handful of mean houses of no interest by the sea, the ruins of the Grey Friars monastery on the hill, and the church of All Saints tottering on the crumbling verge of the disappearing cliff. How any man or woman can consent to live in this environment of desolation is a thing difficult to understand; but there they are, apparently quite cheerful, a living testimony to the elasticity of human spirits. A stranger, having seen the sights, having mused a little as his eyes wander over that dreary expanse of monotonous sea, leaves Dunwich gladly, without the slightest intention of returning, and convinced that a not very prolonged residence there would assuredly produce melancholia in one not to the manner born.
The opinion has been expressed already that it is not worth while at this time of day, and it would probably be hopeless to endeavour, to cope against the untiring sea in its work of demolishing the glacial cliffs south of Dunwich. As they are demolished they go, by virtue of the southerly drift given to the débris, to alter the coastline southward. Attention has been called, for example, to the childish course pursued by the River Alde. The fault does not lie with the river but with the crumbling cliffs of the north, and they are responsible for closing up the natural mouth it once had at Slaugden, barely half a mile from Aldeburgh. At Southwold and Lowestoft defensive works are praiseworthy, because they are feasible and the land is worth protecting, and this is even more true of the vicinity of Felixstowe. Here much land was lost early in the last century, owing to the fact that huge quantities of stones, forming a natural protection, were removed for manufacture into cement, with the result that the shore was denuded, and the loose pebbles were heaped up by the drift into a totally undesirable shingle bank at Landguard Fort. This bank in its turn threatened Harwich Harbour, and a groyne of concrete had to be set up to arrest its progress. These facts, in detail, came to my knowledge through the Engineer in 1906, together with the somewhat appalling estimate of land lost in East Anglia to the extent of 160 square miles in ten centuries. Land has been gained elsewhere, at Bawdsey, where we shall find ourselves very shortly, for example. At Bawdsey it has been gained through human agency to the advantage of humanity, but on the whole the sea, left to its own devices, works destruction at both ends of its operation. It removes the earth from places where it is needed, as at Dunwich for example, and so wipes one flourishing port out of existence: it does its best to deposit that which it has taken away where it is not needed, and to block up one port with the ruins of another. At Harwich it has, we all hope, been stopped, but all the world knows the mischief which has been wrought south of the estuary of the Thames by the gradual process of accretion converting thriving ports into meaningless inland places. What all the world does not realize, and what our most practised engineers in this kind apprehend, without pretending to comprehend fully, is the unforetellable character of the results that will follow from every attempt to interfere with these mysterious processes of nature which takes the form of opposing an obstacle to the sweep of the tide. Thus to build a groyne or a sea wall, to say to the sea in effect, "Thou hast taken so much, but thou shalt take no more," is hardly likely to produce any injurious result. On the other hand, to stretch a solid pier across the drift, and to divert a current, may be to affect the coast line for hundreds of miles along the coast affected by the drift. As an engineer versed in these matters once said to me, "When you interfere with the tides you must wait for the effect; you cannot predict it."
So back to Felixstowe, varying the cross-country route to the main road a little by following the sense of direction without consulting any maps, and seeing nothing worthy of notice except a belated heron, its long legs stretched behind its slow-flapping wings, making its way from the sea to some distant heronry and croaking sadly as it went, as though to say, "The moon will give no light to-night, so I must perforce go fasting." That is a Welsh version of the heron's melancholy call—please note that the heron always wears half mourning—but the marsh men doubtless express the same thought in some way, for it is sound ornithology, and they know their birds passing well.