The Rubble On The Beach

A Memory of Dunwich.

I spent my teenage years in Dunwich, and in retrospect they were wonderful. Freedom, long walks, the beach and sea, cliffs, marshes and the old tank defences from WWII. My best friend Justin North, who lived at 'Marshside' opposite me at The Ship, and I spent hours during those years, roaming, swimming, canoeing, making carts to career down the hill from the monastery, and resurrecting a storm damaged painter's punt washed ashore to row to Walberswick on the irrigation rivers behind the dunes. Although All Saints had fallen off the cliff long before we were born, some of the cemetery remained on the cliff top, including numerous unmarked pauper's graves. Pieces of masonry and rubble still lay at the foot of the cliff, now covered frequently by the tides and the pebbles, but occasionally washed clean for brief periods allowing us to scramble over them. Our most interesting times however were after the neap tides in the Spring when high seas would wash away more of the sandy cliffs, causing minor falls and the exposure of more graves. One one occasion I recall, we saw cut-away graves near the top of the cliff with several leg bones protruding, one above the other, clearly mass graves where a number of bodies had been buried in the same grave. The local vicar, appropriately named I recall, the Revd Lovegood or something similar, used to come along with a plastic sack and collect the skulls and bones thus revealed, and would reinter them in the graveyard in St James' the relatively modern church at the bottom of the main street (St James'). Justin was about to attend Art School and was very interested in photography (he is now a professional), and on one occasion we found a complete skull embedded in a lump of sandy cliff that had slid down from the graveyard. We liberated it, and Justin took it home, cleaned it, and photographed it in various lights, including I recall, having a candle lit inside. I can't remember what eventually happened to it, but if anyone digs the garden at Marshside and finds human remains, that's probably the where they originated from.