Midway between the town of Aldeburgh and the seaside resort of Southwold, two popular spots on Britain’s Suffolk coast, lies the quiet rural village of Dunwich. Around 200 people live in this one-road settlement with its cosy pub/B&B, local museum, long gravel beach and monastery ruins.
You wouldn’t know it now, but in the Middle Ages the village was a thriving port the size of the City of London’s square mile, built on fishing, trade and religious patronage.
Greyfriars Monastery was established by Franciscan monks in the 1250s on lower-lying ground closer to the sea.
But a massive storm in 1286 swept away the monastery, along with many homes and other buildings. The crumbling stone walls you can visit today are the remains of the “new” friary, rebuilt in the late 13th Century on land half a mile from the sea.
They now stand perilously close to the edge of the cliffs – illustrating how storms, surges and coastal erosion turned the tide on thriving Dunwich, some of which was later built on higher ground.
In the intervening years a legend arose that the medieval town remained intact below the surface of the water: Britain’s very own “Atlantis”. Locals have even claimed that at certain stormy times you can hear the church bells ringing.
“This stretch of coastline has a ghostly quality,” said novelist Esther Freud, great-granddaughter of Sigmund, who lives in nearby Walberswick; her grandparents migrated to the area after fleeing Nazi Germany. “Walking along the shoreline on a misty day, you feel the past and present intermingled in this strange liminal space between land and sea.”
Experts, however, thought the old town would have long ago been broken up by the waves and washed away. That is, until evidence began to emerge that this legend of “Britain’s Atlantis” was not just a fanciful tale, but that medieval Dunwich – in at least some of its former glory – was out there, just metres from the shore.
From around the 1960s, fishermen began to report nets snagging on something below the surface of the water where the old town used to stand.
These reports prompted local marine archaeologist and diver Stuart Bacon to search for the remains of the last church to be taken by the sea: All Saints, which finally tumbled from the cliffs in 1911.
Although the North Sea is hostile and usually has almost zero visibility, Bacon persisted. On a rare clear day in 1972, he saw the church’s tower looming through the water – covered in pink sponges and crawling with crabs and lobsters. A subsequent dive also revealed the ruins of another church, St Peter’s.
But it wasn’t until several decades later that a full survey of the seabed provided a much fuller picture of what lay beneath the waves.
