50 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST 



with piles and boarding, but this costs too much to make 

 it worth doing unless the land so preserved has a special 

 value for the erection of houses. 



At Felixstowe, where I am writing, the sea has 

 swept away most of the flat — the " dunes," or " deans " 

 — covered with grass, which it had itself built up by a 

 contrary accumulating action before the time of the 

 Romans. On this flat the ancient Roman town was 

 built. Why the sea has reversed its action is very 

 difficult to say. But within my knowledge of this place 

 high-water mark has advanced as much as 300 yards 

 nearer than it was to the old roadway and to old houses. 

 The great town of Dunwich, which in the Middle Ages 

 had eleven churches, strong fortifications, and a flourishing 

 trade, stood on the flat grass-land in front of the cliff on 

 the Suffolk coast. Its site is now under the sea, not far 

 from here. The breaking away of the cliff (on to which 

 part of the town extended) is still going on there. A 

 few years ago I saw a great bricked well lying like a 

 fallen chimney on the shore. It had been exposed by 

 the crumbling of the cliff, and at last fell out of it. 

 Once that well supplied fresh water to the monastery, 

 part of the walls of which are still standing, and were 

 formerly three-quarters of a mile distant from the sea- 

 shore. The prehistoric cliffs to which the sea came 

 before it formed the flats or links which it is now aerain 

 eating away, are often traceable a mile or two inland. 

 On the other ha«d, on parts of the Lincolnshire coast the 

 sea has piled up sand and shingle and added valuable 

 land to the extent of hundreds of acres to the property 

 of those whose estates were bounded by the shore line, 

 and is still doing so. Perhaps the action of the north 

 wind in blowing back and piling up sand out of the 

 reach of the tide is influential in producing this increase 



