Page:VCH Suffolk 1.djvu/342

 A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK Stour, which unite now in the harbour of Harwich. This harbour, as seen on the map (plan III), has a considerable width, but it has only one deep channel into it, close beside the end of Landguard Common. The sea is shallow, and there were, if there arc not still, considerable sand banks in front of the harbour, as may be seen on the map (plan III). A plan (IV) of the port was made in 1686 by Capt. Grenvil Collins and dedicated to Pepys. It is a well-known fact that the North Sea has, even in historic times of no distant date, largely affected the eastern Flau IV.— -Cha«t of £«Ta4iiics to Ha»wich Harbour in 1686 coast-line of Britain, and very especially portions of Suffolk. Along this Ime of coast from the Deben to the Stour it has been advancing with some rapidity, and in the course of nineteen centuries considerable alterations in the disposition of land and water may have taken place, and so much is this the case, that it is permissible to conjecture, that in the Roman period a tract of salt marshes and sand banks stretched across the present opening of Harwich Harbour, forming a lagoon something like Breydon, from which the united waters of the Stour and Orwell poured themselves into the sea by a passage running at the foot of high land called at its eastern end 288