president’s address. 333 
the departure of Mr. F. Balfour Browne from Sutton to 
Belfast. 
In accordance with custom, it falls to my lot this evening 
to say a few words upon some subject of Natural History 
that I have taken a particular interest in, and I take 
NOTES ON BLAKENEY HARBOUR 
PAST AND PRESENT. 
I avoid as far as possible trespassing on the ground of 
my Archceological friends, and keep to the changes wrought 
by wind and tide on this part of the coast. When one con- 
siders the subject of coastal loss or gain there is not much 
difficulty about the seaboard between Weybourne and 
Yarmouth haven ; the land which has been lost there has been 
valuable ; churches and villages have disappeared into the 
sea, and in consequence the rate of loss has been fairly 
accurately measured, at all events for the last 300 or 400 
years. But when we come to the coast to the westward of 
Weybourne, we find a set of totally different conditions. 
The land encroached upon by the Salthouse shingle beach 
was not of great value, and it seems that this encroachment 
has gradually diminished as one goes west. 1 think, with 
Bloomfield, that Blakeney and Sniterley were one and the 
same town ; in my earliest map (1586) it is called “ Blakeney 
also Sniterley.” 
I show a chart of this part of the North Sea from the 
Admiralty Survey on the scale of three inches to the geo- 
graphical mile, the dark part being that which is dry at low 
water, the lighter shade anything under three fathoms low 
water, and the dotted line the five fathom line : the general 
character of the shoal being a ridge of sand rising forty or 
fifty feet from the bed of the Wash, and sloping gradually 
to the eastward. 
I would here draw attention to the set of the tides on this 
part of the Norfolk coast ; the stream of flood tide which 
