Coastal Resilience: The long view

As Thorpeness contends with storms causing sudden erosion of the coastline and the loss of homes to the sea, it can be helpful to be reminded of the long view. Coastal change reshapes not just shorelines but entire communities — their economies, their social fabric, their sense of who they are. The story of Walberswick, just a few miles down our coast, shows us how profound that reshaping can be.

Walberswick, at the mouth of the Blyth estuary, offers a clear example. Its seventeenth‑century crisis, explored in Peter Warner’s Bloody Marsh: A Seventeenth-century Village in Crisis, sits on top of a much older history shaped by trade, monastic wealth, and the long rhythms of the North Sea.

A Coastline Built on Wool and Water

Long before the marsh turned violent in 1644, Walberswick's fortunes were tied to the North Sea. From the Middle Ages onwards, East Anglia was one of Europe's great wool-producing regions. Suffolk's broad pastures and thriving sheep farms fed a trade that stretched across the North Sea to the Low Countries, where English wool was prized for its quality.

Our coastal ports — Dunwich, Southwold, Walberswick, Blythburgh — acted as vital links in this international network. Even modest havens like Walberswick played their part: ferrying wool, fish, salt, and timber to larger ports, and receiving goods and ideas in return. The sea was not a boundary but a corridor.

Monastic Wealth and the Building of Abbeys

This trade generated immense wealth, and much of it flowed into the hands of the Church. Monastic houses across East Anglia expanded on the back of wool revenues. Abbeys were built or enlarged, churches embellished, estates grew. These religious houses depended on coastal access — they needed fish for fasting days, salt for preservation, timber for construction, and transport routes for their goods.

Walberswick's sheltered position on the Blyth made it a useful supporting harbour, especially when larger ports faced disruption. For centuries, the village lived within this wider monastic economy, largely in the shadow of Dunwich just two miles south along the beach.

The Rise and Fall of Dunwich

To understand what happened to Walberswick, we need to grasp what was lost at Dunwich — because it wasn't just a harbour that disappeared. It was almost an entire town, one that had rivaled London itself.

In 1086, Dunwich had more than 3,000 residents recorded in the Domesday Book. It thrived as the capital of the kingdom of East Anglia, its prosperity resting on wool exports, maritime trade, and the wealth that flowed through its religious houses. The Franciscan friars established Greyfriars Priory before 1277, rebuilding it further inland in 1289 after storms destroyed their first site near the harbour. The Dominicans founded Blackfriars in the thirteenth century. Between them stood markets, guildhalls, parish churches, hospitals serving pilgrims and traders, homes of merchants and craftsmen — the infrastructure of a major medieval port.

Walk along the beach at Dunwich today and you're walking over what were once streets, churches, and marketplaces. The outlines lie beneath the waves offshore.

The destruction came in waves. A devastating storm in 1286 destroyed much of the lower town. The Great Storm of 1328 diverted the river and accelerated the erosion already eating into the cliffs. Church after church fell into the sea — All Saints' first, then St. Peter's, St. Nicholas, St. Martin's. With them went markets, homes, and eventually the harbour itself. By the time of the Dissolution in 1538, much of Dunwich's monastic life had already been undermined by the advancing sea. Today, fewer than 200 people live where thousands once traded, worshipped, and raised families.

This wasn't a quick disaster. It was a slow unraveling across three centuries — long enough for people to watch their grandparents' world literally fall into the ocean, to argue about where to rebuild, to fight over diminishing resources, to see their children leave for more stable ground.

Walberswick in Dunwich's Shadow

Walberswick felt every shift at Dunwich. As the larger port declined, some trade redistributed to nearby harbours. But the same forces that destroyed Dunwich were already at work on the Blyth. Gravel driven by the North Sea began to choke the estuary's mouth. Channels shifted. Access worsened. The wealth that had once flowed through the region slowed to a trickle. Then came the Dissolution. The monastic houses that had sustained demand for coastal services — for fish, for transport, for goods — were swept away. By the early seventeenth century, Walberswick was no longer part of a thriving North Sea economy. It was a small, struggling community on a shifting estuary, its maritime role diminishing, its economic foundations crumbling.

A Community Under Strain

By the 1600s, the village was under pressure from several directions. Land was scarce. Grazing rights were contested. The poorest households were increasingly vulnerable. Peter Warner's research in Bloody Marsh: A Seventeenth-century Village in Crisis shows a community caught between older communal practices and new pressures from landowners seeking control over marsh and meadow. The marshes — once shared resources — became flashpoints. Access to grazing meant access to survival. When that access was threatened, social bonds began to fray. The crisis erupted in 1644. A dispute over grazing rights escalated into violence on the marsh. One man was killed. The authorities intervened. Three villagers were tried and hanged. These executions were not an isolated incident. They were the culmination of pressures that had been building for generations: the loss of maritime work, the collapse of the monastic economy, the enclosure of common land, the erosion of trust in a community that had watched its neighbours at Dunwich lose everything to the sea and now feared losing what little remained to each other. The trauma ran deep. Families were broken. A small community, already weakened by economic decline and environmental change, was shaken to its core. The memory of the Bloody Marsh — the violence, the hangings, the betrayals — became part of the village's identity, a wound that shaped how people related to one another for generations. After 1644, Walberswick did not disappear, but it changed. The harbour continued to silt. Parts of the church fell into disrepair and were never restored — you can still see where the building was reduced in size, a physical reminder of diminished fortunes and diminished hope.

The village entered a long period of hardship. People adapted where they could — fishing, small-scale farming, seasonal labour — but the sense of a shared maritime identity, of being part of something larger than themselves, had been damaged. What emerged was more inward-looking, more cautious, more aware of its own fragility.

Finding New Ground

The adaptation happened slowly, across generations rather than years. Without the harbour trade, Walberswick turned more fully to what the sea and marsh still offered. Fishing became central — not the grand enterprises of the medieval port, but smaller-scale work: catching herring and sprats, gathering samphire and shellfish, working the tides. The marshes, once fought over so bitterly, became productive in different ways: reed-cutting for thatch, wildfowling, seasonal grazing managed through careful negotiation rather than violent dispute.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the village had found a kind of stability, though on much reduced terms. The population remained small. Families intermarried, creating tight networks of kinship that helped distribute risk and resources. Social memory of the Bloody Marsh shaped a wariness about conflict — people had learned, painfully, what happened when disputes escalated.

The church, though diminished, remained a focal point. The truncated building became a symbol not of what was lost but of what endured — imperfect, smaller than it once was, but still standing. Communities need such symbols when so much else has changed.

Then came a different kind of transformation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, artists discovered Walberswick. The light, the big skies, the quiet estuary — qualities that emerged from decline — attracted painters and writers seeking something that felt authentic and unspoiled. The village that had lost its medieval prosperity found a new identity: not as a trading port, but as a place of beauty and tranquility.

This wasn't restoration. The wool trade didn't return. The harbour didn't recover. But the village found other ways to survive and eventually to thrive: different livelihoods, different relationships with the land and sea, different stories about who they were. The very emptiness left by economic collapse became, paradoxically, a kind of resource.

Today's Walberswick — with its beach huts, sailing club, artists' studios, and holiday cottages — bears little resemblance to the medieval port or the fractured seventeenth-century community. Yet it endures, shaped by centuries of adaptation to forces beyond its control.

Why This History Matters Now

Today, as Thorpeness loses homes to sudden storms and villages across our coast face rising seas and shifting economics, Walberswick's long story offers uncomfortable perspective. It shows us that coastal change doesn't just reshape shorelines — it reshapes societies. It can push communities to breaking point. It can turn neighbours against each other when resources become scarce and the future feels uncertain.

But it also shows us something about endurance. Walberswick is still here. The village didn't restore what was lost — that was impossible. Instead, it found ways to live with loss, to build new identities, to adapt across generations.

The parallels to our current moment are not exact, but they're real. Like seventeenth-century Walberswick, our coastal communities face multiple pressures at once: environmental change, economic uncertainty, debates over land use and access, questions about who belongs and who benefits. Like Walberswick, we're watching some of our neighbours — Thorpeness, Hemsby, Happisburgh — lose ground in ways that feel sudden even when the forces have been building for years.

The question Walberswick poses to us is not whether change can be stopped — history suggests it cannot — but what are the challenges we need to navigate.

How does a village avoid the fractures, as Walberwick face in 1644?

What are the best ways to maintain the bonds that hold communities together even as the ground shifts beneath us?

In Walberswick, the village's path from medieval port to artists' haven wasn't planned. It emerged from countless small adaptations, from people finding meaning in what remained rather than mourning what was lost, from recognizing that resilience sometimes means becoming something entirely different from what you once were.

That's the real test of resilience. Not whether we can hold back the sea, but whether we can hold onto each other as it rises — and whether we can imagine futures that don't depend on restoring a past that's already slipping beneath the waves.