The murky waters of Dunwich conceal so much: not just more porpoises but old merchant houses and graves and churches and even, perhaps most astonishingly of all, an ancient aqueduct. It is still an aqueduct of sorts now, wherever it is. One of Dunwich’s most calamitous storms, in 1740, not only destroyed more of the cliff but, to the villagers’ horror, uncovered bones and buildings lost to the sea centuries before. When you’re on the beach in summer and burying a person to her neck in pebbles, as I did with a group of Norwich friends here one summer, a macabre note is added to the activity by the realisation that a matter of yards away actual human remains are submerged beneath dark water and turbid stone. In March with a storm raging and the beach full of fresh driftwood and flotsam, it’s even more possible to look at the horizon and picture Dunwich’s old frontier, more than a mile out there, in the waves: a place that, had Poseidon been feeling more benevolent towards it over the last millennium, might have gone on to outshine Norwich as East Anglia’s finest city. Staring at the sea is always a cathartic reminder of human insignificance, but there’s an extra cathartic element on this stretch of coast that perhaps gives it its unique power: a reminder not just of our insignificance but of the way the things around us with a strong illusion of permanence can crumble, a reminder of change and the lack of choice we have in life to do anything but embrace it.
Looking back in the direction of the rest of Suffolk and Norfolk from the back ledge of the beach here I sometimes get the sense that the angry saltwater has already got the better of the land, imprinted itself onto it: that, lacking the big rocky walls which defend so much of Britain’s west coast, East Anglia’s big horizons and quiet spaces, its horror-film emptiness, are creations of the sea’s force – or at least its strong salty air. I feel another aspect of this nine miles north of Dunwich at Covehithe, a very different stretch of beach, possibly even more desolate. Since 1830 its cliffs have been forced back more than five hundred metres, and there is no sign of a slowing of the erosion. Almost exactly a year after my Dunwich trip, on another dizzy day when my suppressed love for soft scary East Anglia tripped me over, I walked from Covehithe’s double church – a vast ruin, courtesy of Cromwell’s armies in the Civil War, and a smaller, newer church inside it – north up the beach and was rendered open-mouthed by the latest dramatic leap the shoreline had taken backwards. It was if someone had popped a balloon or crisp packet next to the shoreline when it had not been expecting it. What I thought impossible had happened: Covehithe looked even more post-apocalyptic than it had half a decade before. The remains of a cliff-top copse I had walked through on my way to Benacre Broad in 2012 were now scattered on the beach, the salt-blasted roots of its trees being shaped by the tide more each day into something an elaborately branded corporate think tank might give a sculptor in Southwold or Aldeburgh a handsome cheque to produce. The stretch of beach beside the broad itself – already becoming a salty lagoon on my last visit – was now unnegotiable unless the tide was right out, freshwater and saltwater having finally become an irreversible cocktail. ‘Can we get across that?’ I asked Isabelle, a long term walking companion I’d been reunited with for the morning, assessing the churning sandbanked natural well where sea met broad. ‘Yeah!’ we chorused. But we couldn’t. We didn’t even give it a proper try. We’d have been up to our waists in no time. Bad things could happen here despite the soft lull of the land. This was the place where Charles Halfacree,
