The author Henry James on a visit to Suffolk in 1897 wrote:
'I defy any one, at desolate,
exquisite Dunwich, to be disappointed in anything. The minor
key is struck here with a felicity that leaves no sigh to be breathed, no loss to be suffered .
. . Dunwich is not even the ghost of its dead self; almost all you can say of it is that it
consists of the mere letters of its old name. The coast, up and down, for miles, has been,
for more centuries than I presume to count, gnawed away by the sea. All the grossness of
its positive life is now at the bottom of the German Ocean, which moves for ever, like a
ruminating beast, an insatiable, indefatigable lip. . . . There is a presence in what is
missing—there is history in there being so little. It is so
little, today, that every item of the
handful counts. The biggest items are of course the two ruins, the great church and its tall
tower, now quite on the verge of the cliff, and the crumbled,
ivied wall of the immense
cincture of the Priory.'—
The cliff at Dunwich has long been eaten back beyond the west end of the great church,
of which
nothing is left. Knowing what was lost gives an even greater presence in what is missing, which
makes Dunwich a magical place. Once it was a bustling and prosperous port and shipyard of
medieval East Anglia and knowing this adds to the attraction of a nondescript crumbling cliff top,
that a few miles further up the coast is to most people commonplace and boring. It is the notions
about a place as it was in the past that halt the stranger in his tracks to sink his mind into the
special quality of magic that is easier to feel than define.
The town of Dunwich cannot be brought back, but the modern conservation movement is
concerned
with protection and enhancement of landscape features that trigger notions of place. Conservation
sentiment is entirely understandable as an indicator of the perceptions of one party in the perpetual
division in English opinion and literature over what attitudes to strike towards landscapes. These
feelings and perceptions cannot be dismissed or refuted by an appeal to the overall facts of the
matter. They are rooted in prejudices or value-systems whose validity is not open to empirical
verification of that sort, and they are held by people with passionate loyalties to highly specific
and
particular little places. These local spots may indeed have changed from summer hayfield, redolent
with romantic memories of half-perceived youthful love, to acre upon acre of hedgeless barley
arable, in much less than half a lifetime. The size of the loss can be measured, and in the case of
prairie agriculture can amount to the scenic uniformity of several 10km squares on the map of a
particular parish. However, there is another immeasurable issue of the quality of the relationship
between what was lost and what was, or should have been, retained.
