Thanks to a team of underwater archaeologists from the University of Southampton, we should soon be able to sense the bustle of medieval Dunwich. At the current rate it won’t be too long before the archaeologists are called to do the same for Norwich. In April the Government’s nature quango, Natural England, revealed that it is thinking of letting the sea reclaim 25 square miles, and six villages, of Norfolk.
The story of Dunwich, or rather a misreading of the story, is frequently cited as justification for the Government’s policy of abandoning sea defences – or “coastal realignment”, as it is euphemistically described. Look at Dunwich, goes the argument, to see the futility of trying to hold back the waves.
Read the full piece by guest contributor Ross Clark on the Times website
Northam Burrows England’s oldest golf course is disappearing into the sea by up to 90ft a year after members were banned from protecting it by “potwalloping” - for the first time in more than a century.
Officials at the 18-hole Royal Devon Golf Club, at Northam Burrows, near Westward Ho!, say large chunks of the links course are being reclaimed by the sea.
The course was established in 1864 and takes a regular battering from the Bristol Channel. Every year Torridge District Council has protected its seaward ridges by using machinery to pile up pebbles to limit the damage of the sea. But Natural England has told it that it is no longer allowed to interfere with nature because the course lies on a site of special scientific interest.
Members have also been banned from resurrecting the custom of “potwalloping”, where local people would pile the stones by hand.
David Lloyd, 60, a club member and former chairman, said that unless the ridge was protected, the course would lose the 7th and 8th holes as early as next year.
“I remember potwalloping as a child to protect the golfing green,” he said. “Twice a year, thousands of people would get together and potwallop on the beach.”
Published on the Times website 20 May 2008 also on the Guardian website
Cuckmere Haven in East Sussex is the quintessential English beauty spot. In the bed of the valley a river meanders lazily down to the sea. Cows graze in lush green pastures. The smooth flanks of the South Downs rise on either side until those to the east terminate abruptly in the sheer chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters with their panoramic views of the English Channel.
This idyllic scenery is enjoyed by more than 400,000 visitors a year. A beautiful photograph of a 19th-century coastguard cottage on the valley’s westward side sustained Robbie Turner through the horrors of the Second World War in the film Atonement. But Cuckmere Haven is also — though the casual hiker would never guess it — the centre of a raging controversy over government plans to let it revert to what it was before man began tinkering with nature: a tidal estuary with saltmarsh and mud flats.
Read the full story by Martin Fletcher on the Times website
Like Churchill, Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British Army, is preparing to fight them on the beaches. He is not alone. The Norfolk landowner has been promised support from hundreds of angry villagers, appalled by official plans to flood a stretch of East Anglia’s coastline, letting the sea roll into 25 square miles of the Norfolk Broads, drowning six villages, hundreds of homes and thousands of acres of prime farming land. All along the East Coast, local communities are preparing for conflict with the Environment Agency over its plans for “managed retreat” - surrendering low-lying lands to the encroaching sea. At an ever quicker pace, South-East England is sinking, and the agency, appalled at the cost of keeping the sea at bay, has decided it will no longer play Canute.
Read the full article on the Times website
AS head of the army, his job is to defend the realm against any incursion. Now General Sir Richard Dannatt has taken up arms against a new invader - the North Sea, which under a bureaucratic plan may be allowed to take over swathes of his beloved Norfolk Broads.
Dannatt, chief of the general staff, has warned of the “tragedy” threatening the area if the scheme is put into effect. It would see the defences holding back the sea retreat four miles from a stretch of East Anglian coast, surrendering 25 square miles of territory - including five villages - to rising sea levels.
Read the full story by Roger Waite on the Times website
A big section of the Norfolk Broads as well as a cluster of villages and thousands of acres of farmland face being surrendered to the sea under secret plans to save the rest of the Norfolk coast from the impact of climate change. A scheme drawn up by experts at Natural England, the body born out of the Countryside Agency and English Nature in 2006, envisages that 25 square miles of fen and fields would be wiped off the map for ever in an attempt to realign the coastline.
Read the full story by Countryside Editor Valerie Elliott on the Times website
Article in the Times by Libby Purves:
It is strange when the sun shines on days of meteorological crisis. It happened here in Suffolk after the ‘87 hurricane, glorious blue-and-golden days illuminating a chaotic landscape of fallen timber and sparking power lines. On Friday morning too it shone, as the storm surge drove great hammering, spouting fists of water up against sea walls, drowned quays and turned the A12 into a shining extension of the Blyth estuary. Early in the day the sea wall at Aldeburgh, a thin battlement between rising brown river and hammering waves, felt like the only place to be. There is fear and loss and inconvenience in these great natural events, but there is also exhilaration.
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