Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 7.djvu/82

 62

NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. VIL JAN. 26, 1907,

town on the West Rocks (called Cliff Foot Rocks on nineteenth-century charts). It is said that remains of buildings have been seen there and stones of buildings have been dredged up from the sea bottom. He has been told by a dredgerman that his informant has himself seen part of a church spire dredged up. But Mr. Marsden dis- misses all this as " fishermen's tales " that are common on the east coast, and probably have their origin in the fact that remains of the wholly or partially submerged towns of " Ravenspur " (Ravenser and Ravenser- Odd ?), Dunwich, &c., have been found, but surely not on the West Rocks at Harwich. He admits there is no doubt that Walton Naze once extended much further to sea than it does now ; it wastes daily, and so long ago as the fourteenth century parts of the lands of " the church of London " in that locality were described as consumpta per mare. If, however, by all this he means to imply that the West Rocks once formed part of the mainland, then the town which once stood there must also have been in the county of Essex and could not have been Orwell, as Morant asserts (' History of Essex,' p. 501), because the latter town belonged to Suffolk, unless it stood on an island, off Walton Naze.

Mr. Hurwood, in a paper read in Novem- ber, 1860, before the Institution of Civil Engineers ' On the River Orwell and the Port of Ipswich,' referred to "an old map of England " from which " it appeared that the locality on which Landguard Fort now stood was originally an island, and that the harbour had formerly two entrances ; the northern entrance, it might be assumed, had been closed up by travelling shingle."

Landguard Fort was built according to the same writer in the reign of James I., for the defence of the harbour, and by an old picture it appeared that its site was then the extremity of Landguard Point.

Morant also suggests that the rivers Stour and Orwell formerly flowed into the sea under Bull's Cliff at Felixstowe, some dis- tance (2 miles) north of the present estuary; but I agree with Mr. Marsden this must have been a long time ago, probably not in historical times, and long before Orwell existed.

Samuel Dale (in 1730) refers to an old author who " sometime since affirmed " that the present entrance to Harwich harbour is artificial and of no old date, the old channel having been formerly on the other side of Landguard Fort, " which then stood in Essex." The old author in question was,

no doubt, Edmund Gibson, the Bishop of London and editor of one of the English editions of Camden's ' Britannia,' whose theory Dale himself attacked in a letter dated February, 1703, and addressed to Edward Lhwyd, Keeper of the Ashmolean Repository in Oxford. It was published in vol. xxiv. of the Philosophical Transac- tions (concerning Harwich Cliff and the fossils found there).

I quote below the passage from Silas Taylor's MS. which gave occasion to Dale to refer to his older contribution to the- literature of the subject :

"It is generally believed that the S ton re did formerly in a streighter current (than now it doth), discharge itself into the sea about Hoasley-Bav under the highlands of Walton-Coleness and Felix- stow in the County of Suffolk, betwixt which

and Landguard Fort are, as they are reputed certain remains of the old channel, which the neighbouring Inhabitants still call Flwlx, retaining at this day [1676] the tradition of the course of the water, and the entrance into this haven to have heretofore been by and through them ; and con- sequently below them (North- Kast) to have been that before mentioned Ostium Stoiiri"

But Hollesley Bay is 1 1 miles from Land- guard Point, and therefore a good distance beyond Bull's Cliff and Felixstowe ; and owing to the presence of the high lands referred to by Taylor, the river could have never flowed into the sea so far north.

Mr. Marsden's statement, however, that the harbour mouth has not materially changed its position for upwards of 400 years, is equally incorrect. I have only to refer him to the Report of Capt. John Washington, R.N., published as Appendix A of the ' Report of the Commissioners upon the Subject of Harbours of Refuge ' in 1845, from which it will suffice to quote the follow- ing paragraph :

" But while the sea has gained upon the land on the western [the Essex] side of the harbour [by having washed aAvay Beacon Cliff], the contrary has taken place on the eastern or (Suffolk side, where within the last 30 years Landguard Point has grown out 1,500 feet, thereby blocking up the chief en- brance into the harbour ; so that where in the year 1804 was a channel seven fathoms deep at low water is now a shingle beach as many feet above high- water mark."

This was in 1843.

The progress, however, was subsequently

hecked by the erection of a stone break- water, on the Essex side, run out from the

bot of Beacon Cliff, and by the removal by- dredging of several shoals within Harwich

larbour, the object of these works being to restore the scour of the tidal streams to the Landguard Point side of the entrance and