Tag: coastal erosion

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Of Whales and Ancestors: Ostend, Norfolk

The very mention of the village of Happisburgh in Norfolk brings to mind all manner of prehistoric associations and connections with long-extinct ancestors. The early years of this current century have revealed exciting local evidence of the presence of earliest hominins in northwest Europe: Homo antecessor (‘Pioneer Man’) – near million-year-old clues in the form of flint tools and muddy footprints. Early humans walked these shores in the early Pleistocene, except it wasn’t so much a shore then as a river estuary: the Thames in an earlier incarnation when it flowed further north than its current course. Political boundaries were yet to exist, 800,000 years ago; the land mass that was Britain was still connected to Eurasia.

Prehistory aside, Happisburgh (pronounced ‘Haze-bruh’ to those who know) is also well known for other reasons. Its fame precedes it, although notoriety might be a better term. Nowhere on this coastline is the menace of coastal erosion witnessed more emphatically, although the near-vanished village of Dunwich on the Suffolk coast, once a thriving medieval port, might come close. For Dunwich the damage wreaked by the ever-invading North Sea is the past; in Happisburgh it is the present and future. Continually losing territory to the North Sea, there is visible evidence of the dynamic shifting shoreline to be seen everywhere here. Cliffs can be witnessed crumbling on a regular basis. Houses that were once located comfortably inland now perch perilously close to cliff edges; some have already succumbed and their remains litter the beach. Roads and tracks can be seen dramatically truncated along the cliff edge – streets that have become roads to nowhere, roads that lead to oblivion.

Even the village’s longstanding icons – the 15th-century St Mary’s church with its commandingly tall tower, the second highest in the county, and the equally imposing red-banded Trinity lighthouse built in 1790, Norfolk’s oldest – are both numbered in their days and probably won’t see this century out. The writing has been on the wall for a long time now – this northwest stretch of the Norfolk littoral is, after all, a fast-eroding coastline where such things can only be expected. Even so, the terrifying spectre of irreversible climate change does nothing but hasten the inevitable. Bold efforts have been made to ameliorate the threat: large chunks of alien geology have been transported here to be deposited on the beach – stone barriers to hold back the tide – yet somehow it feels like the wrong sort of folk tale: a village boy taking up a slingshot against a giant ogre, a near-futile King Cnut-like gesture.

So, there is plenty to say about Happisburgh but what of Ostend, its immediate neighbour to the north? Walking the coast here recently in preparation for a new book on short walks in Norfolk, I tried to find out more about the small settlement that shares its name with the better known Belgian resort. Information was elusive, other than it belonged to the parish of Walcott and was effectively an area of holiday properties appended to the south of that village. The name intrigued me, though, and I wondered whether there was a historical connection as there are several Waterloo farms scattered around Norfolk that commemorate the final victory over Napoleon close to the Belgian town of that name. Until 2001, when it was finally demolished, there used to be an early 17th century house in the village was called Ostend House. There may possibly be a connection here but was it always called Ostend House, or did the name come with the rebuild that took place in the 19th century?

Looking further for information, Wikipedia informed me that in June 2002 a rare Cuvier’s beaked whale was stranded on the beach here. This was the same species of whale that Kathleen Jamie describes being on display in Bergen’s Whale Museum. The Bergen whale was found choked by plastic bags that the unfortunate animal had probably mistakenly recognised as squid, its prime food source. As I had only just (twice) read Jamie’s latest book Cairn,which describes her return visit to the Norwegian museum, there was an immediate connection for me here, although it was nothing to do with the name of the place.

The whale was named by the French scientist Georges Cuvier (1769—1832)*, a polymath who was the first to coin the term ‘extinction’. In 1796 Cuvier presented a paper to the National Institute of Science and Arts in Paris, where he compared the anatomy of living and fossil elephants to prove that extinction was a fact and proposed that the now-extinct elephants had been wiped out by periodic catastrophic flooding events. Although a proponent of catastrophism in geology, Cuvier rejected the idea of organic evolution. As an essentialist he believed that plants and animals were created for particular roles and niches in the world environment and subsequently remained unchanged throughout their existence. In Cuvier’s thinking, as soon as one species became extinct as the result of geological upheaval, another would be divinely created to replace it. It would be Charles Darwin, of course, who would set the record straight some 65 years later with the publication of his On the Origin of Species. What Darwin would have made of the 21st-century discovery of evidence of a long-extinct ancestor, Homo antecessor, on a sea-battered English shoreline we can only imagine. Evolution to extinction: such a surprisingly short distance of time and space linking the two.

*[Alas, Cuvier’s name has also been linked with scientific racism, although we might excuse him for being, as the cliché goes, ‘a man of his time’. Of course, modern-day racists should not be forgiven in the same way – they are not men (or women) of their time. We might, I suppose, call them dinosaurs but to do that would be a disservice to palaeontology.]

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Lammas Day, Suffolk Coast

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Lammas Day – the first day of August. School holidays, warm weather, beach visits, perhaps a swim in the sea? Or, on a windy cloudy day, a walk; a beach walk. At low to mid tide it is possible to follow the beach all the way between Lowestoft and Southwold on the north Suffolk coast without ever venturing inland. The coast along this stretch of the North Sea foreshore is a mixture of sand and shingle, with low cliffs and the occasional freshwater broad lying perilously close to the ever advancing tide. At odds with the gentle agricultural landscape of the hinterland the coast here is an uncompromising full stop in the landscape: a sudden transition from land to sea. Far to the east, beyond the horizon, are the European Low Countries that were once so closely tied, economically, and culturally, to this region. Lowland – sea bed – low land: the North Sea (WG Sebald’s ‘German Ocean’ in The Rings of Saturn) is but a watery interruption in the flow of things, both a barrier and a conduit for the movement of humans and goods. IMG_1716I set out from Kessingland, just south of Lowestoft, where a large expanse of dunes and shingle separates the sea from the holiday homes and caravans that line the low clifftop like racing cars at a starting grid preparing to rush towards the sea. Truth be told, there is little in the way to stop them. It may be August but even now the beach is relatively quiet – just a few families and dog-walkers clambering over the dunes to reach the sea, which today is grey, grumpy and not particularly welcoming. The Kessingland littoral is distinguished by its specialist salt-tolerant flora: sea holly, sea pea, sea campion, sea beet – in fact, place a ‘sea’ in front of any common plant name and there is a good chance that such a species will exist and flourish here. Also rooted into the shingle, thriving on little more than sunshine and salt spray, are clumps of yellow-horned poppies with long twisting seed pods. The poppies are mostly past their flowering peak but elsewhere, where there is a thin veneer of soil to root into, colour is provided by stands of rosebay willow herb – a rich purple layer of distraction between the straw-hued shingle and the cloud-heavy sky, both washed of colour in the flat coastal light. IMG_1718Further south, the cliffs grow a little higher. Ferrous red and as soft and powdery as halva, they are irredeemably at the mercy of the North Sea tide. And it shows: the cliffs are raw and freshly cleaved, with collapsed chunks that have been further eroded by the incoming tide such that they appear to seep from the cliff bases like congealed gravy.  Man-made objects receive no preferential treatment – a collapsed WWII concrete defence bunker slopes between cliff and sand at one point, its long process of total disintegration still in its infancy as its perches ignominiously at 45 degrees, an involuntary buttress for the flaking cliffs.IMG_1744

The cliffs may be ephemeral geomorphology, constantly pushed back by the eroding tide, but they possess enough permanence for colonies of sand martins to pit them with nesting burrows high up the cliff face. The birds swoop and chatter in high-pitched whispers as they gather flies above the shingle, flying in and out their nest holes faster than the eye can bring itself into focus. IMG_1802

Further along, a red-brick building lies in an even more advanced state of breakdown. Dead trees, devoid of bark and bleached pale by saltwater protrude from the sand. Some stand roots-proud with their upper trunks planted in the sand as if drawing nutrition from deep underground. Others are inverted stumps that appear to channel the centrepiece of north Norfolk’s sacred Seahenge, upturned roots on display like rustic altars.IMG_1768

IMG_1783The tide is still going out, revealing new treasures on the wet smooth sand. Footprints ahead of me heading south look like my own but, of course, they are not – I have not been there yet. The unidentified boot-print doppelganger must be far ahead of me. One of the imprints has narrowly missed a solitary beached jellyfish, red-veined and otherworldly. Soon I notice more jellyfish on the tideline: unveined, translucent specimens that stare up from the sand like the detached iris of a giant’s eye.IMG_1770

Approaching Southwold, the pier stretching out to sea becomes clearer in detail. The town’s white lighthouse flashes in warning. Beyond the resort, a few miles further south, the gargantuan golf ball of Sizewell B glows uncannily white. Halfway between sea and cliff on the freshly revealing sand are miscellaneous concrete blocks, remains of footings, moorings, buildings. Some of these have been almost completely submerged by sand to leave a line of tiny pyramids like the vertebra of a buried dragon. Frame the scene carefully and squint and this might be an aerial view over the Egyptian desert. The lack of a viable sphinx and presence of a battered clifftop caravan soon disabuses such fantastical musing.IMG_1810

Southwold arrives – or, rather, I arrive there – the beach approach heralded by groynes and breakwaters. Then comes the first phalanx of the town’s famously expensive beach huts, a sink estate for solvent holiday makers who have succumbed to the Southwold equivalent of shed-envy. The huts trace a line along the seafront past the pier where a Punch and Judy show is underway, delighting a crowd of children and adults with good old-fashioned, non-PC entertainment that glosses over domestic violence and police brutality. “That’s the way to do it,” swazzles Mr Punch before exclaiming, “Lookout children, the Devil’s going to come and get you.” The Devil was, in fact, coming for Mr Punch yet is outwitted by the trickster anyway in the show’s denouement. Light entertainment, yet such darkness – the seaside has always taken liberties with propriety.

For more on this stretch of coast see my earlier post: At Covehithe

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At Covehithe

IMG_1981The day before the autumn equinox: the setting, the beach at Covehithe. We have gathered here at the north Suffolk coast to walk and talk. A literary walk to celebrate W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, no less, organised as part of the Waveney & Blyth Arts festival. The weather – hazy grey skies, mist, light drizzle – is suitably Sebaldian.

Proceedings begin at Covehithe’s St Andrew’s Church – itself a curiosity, a church within a church –the large medieval shell of the original church sheltering the tiny 17th-century thatched-roofed replacement that was built when the former became too expensive for villagers to maintain. The fine 15th-century tower abuts the later build, dwarfing almost mockingly its dinky proportions. Before taking a pew to hear an introduction by UEA lecturers Jo Catling and Barbara Marshall, who both knew and worked with W. G. ‘Max’ Sebald, some of us examine the font, recycled from the earlier church, which has stylised lions and hairy human-like figures that have had their heads chiselled off. Headless or not, these strange decapitated figures are recognisable as representations of the woodwose (wild man), a creature that belongs to the same fabulist stable as the Green Man, the crude anti-masonry no doubt the handiwork of William Dowsing’s men as it was these same arch-puritans who did for the stained glass windows that used to illuminate the original church.

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We drift down to the beach by way of Covehithe Broad – the direct road from Covehithe is closed and fenced-off these days thanks to the coastal erosion that constantly depletes this shoreline. The broad’s brackish water is alive with Canada geese that honk plaintively, their voices coming through the mist even before we can see them. The geese take off sporadically in small groups to circuit and survey the parish before returning to the watery comfort of the broad. At the shore, the tide is out and the beach is deserted but for the presence of a distant dog-walker and our own gaggle of muse-seeking Sebaldians. To the north, the curve of the coast at Benacre Ness near Kessingland can just about be discerned. Southwold lies to the south: a distinctive profile that stretches from sea to land – first pier, then low town roofs and blinking lighthouse before a water tower marks the point where the town ends and the Sandlings and marshes begin.

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We walk north along the beach in small amorphous groups exchanging thoughts on Sebald’s gloomy oeuvre. The cliffs of Covehithe feature in The Rings of Saturn, albeit briefly, which is of course why this was chosen as a suitable territory for the walk. It was here that the author stood on the cliffs and gazed out on the leaden-coloured water of what he describes as the German Ocean (a rather archaic term for the North Sea that went out of fashion at the end of the 19th century but chosen by Sebald for his own, anything but nationalistic, reasons). As he lowered his gaze to the beach below he inadvertently spied a couple making love and noted that “it seemed that the man’s feet twitched like those of one just hanged”. Overcome with panic at the sight of this “many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of a prodigious species” he left to walk to Southwold.

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Thankfully, no such sexual shenanigans affronted us on Saturday. In fact, the only other living thing on the beach other than a desultory parliament of herring gulls was a lone figure scrutinising the foreshore for Paleolithic flint hand tools that we were assured sometimes turn up here. The walk’s turning point was probably somewhere in the shadow of Covehithe church, although we could not see its landmark tower from our position on the sand beneath the cliff. Having examined some of the evocative bleached tree stumps that decorate the beach here like Arts Council sculptures, looked at the ever-receding cliffs with their abandoned sand martin burrows and observed a solitary craft out to sea just as Sebald had done, we turned to face south. With Southwold’s low skyline now silhouetted on the brightening horizon we placed the North Sea/German Ocean to our left as we ruminated and slowly ambled our way back to Covehithe’s church within a church. In half a century or so, this may well be gone, a victim of the ferocious erosion that defines this coastline. Covehithe and its church will have vanished forever, living on only in memory and books – a place of legend.