HUNGRY WAVES.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 56, Issue 156, 15 April 1936, Page 6

HUNGRY WAVES.

COASTLINE “EATEN AWAY.” An English landmark is disappearing. The Selsey Bill a high point on the Sussez coast, may be unknown by another generation. Recently two houses, first of a group of villas used for years by London families in holiday months, were swallowed up by tlie sea. A whole row of holiday homes within a few yards of the famous lifeboat slipway at Selsey are doomed. Protective concrete works have been battered to pieces and strewn on tlie beach. All round the coastline of the Selsey Manhood from Pagliam Harbour, where man reclaimed hundreds of acres from the sea only to lose it all in one stormy night in i9lO, right round to the Witterings and the channel leading inland to the creeks of Chichester Harbour, the coastline is slowly surrendering to the ocean. Selsey still boasts the old Saxon names of Aylwin and Aylmore in every village. A few days ago, writes a “Sunday Express’’ representative, I stood on the beach near the coastguard station with one of the Aylmores. “J. remember my grandfather standing at this point,” lie said, “and telJr in gme that four miles out our family farmlands were lying under the waves, lands which he roamed over as a boy. “That means that about a century ago the beach was four miles further out than it is now.” Domesday Book and the Venerable Bede speak of the Island of Selsey, when the waters flowed between it and the mainland.