30 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA. 
gradual, it excites only local attention.” On the same coast, 
the ancient villages of Shipden, Wimpwell, and Eccles have 
disappeared, several manors and large portions of neighbour- 
ing parishes having gradually been swallowed up; nor has 
there been any intermission, from time immemorial, in the 
ravages of the sea along a line of coast twenty miles in 
length in which these places stood. Dunwich, once the most 
considerable seaport on the coast of Suffolk, is now but a 
small village with about one hundred inhabitants. From the 
time of Edward the Confessor, the ocean has devoured, piece 
after piece, a monastery, seven churches, the high road, the 
town-hall, the gaol, and many other buildings. In the sixteenth 
century not one-fourth of the ancient town was left standing, 
yet, the inhabitants retreating inland, the name has been pre- 
served, — 
“Stat magni nominis umbra,’— 
as has been the case with many other ports, when their ancient 
site has been blotted out. 
The Isle of Sheppey is subject to such rapid decay, that the 
church at Minster, now near the coast, is said to have been in 
the middle of the island fifty years ago, and it has been con- 
jectured that at the present rate of destruction, the whole isle 
will be annihilated before the end of the century. 
Another remarkable instance of the destructive action of 
the tidal surge is that cf Reculver, on the Kentish coast, an 
important military station in the time of the Romans, now 
nothing but a ruin and a name. So late as the reign of 
Henry VIII., Reculver was still a mile distant from the sea; 
but, in 1780, the encroaching waves had already reached the 
site of the ancient camp, the walls of which, cemented as they 
were into one solid mass by the unrivalled masonry of the 
Romans, continued for several years after they were under- 
mined to overhang the sea. In 1804, part of the churchyard 
with the adjoining houses was washed away, and then the 
ancient church with its two lofty spires, a well-known land- 
raark, was dismantled and abandoned as a place of worship. 
Shakspeare’s Cliff at Dover has also suffered greatly from the 
waves, and continually diminishes in height, the slope of the 
hill being towards the land. About the year 1810, there was 
