THIRTY VILLAGES IN SEA

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 12, 5 April 1927, Page 3

THIRTY VILLAGES IN SEA

A SHRINKING COASTLINE At Aldbrough pieces of cliff as big as putting greens are breaking off and being washed away all along the coast, according to a correspondent of the ** Daily Mail.” Many tons of England have disappeared. At Aldbrough, between Hornsea and Withernsea, where for a mile wooden bungalows once stretched in a line, their owners are hurriedly moving them. One woman woke up to find her garden path gone and the steep drop of the cliff a couple of feet from her front door. Only at the seaside towns where there is a costly seawall is the erosion being held. Even the precautions taken at Hornsea are not effective, and the sea comes up frequently to threaten the railway station. It is, however, at Spurn Point, at the mouth of the Humber, where the greatest alteration to the map of England is threatened. The promontory, which carried a lighthouse and several cottages, is held to the mainland now by a strip of land below Kilnsea only as wide as a street. How Yorkshire is being eaten away was shown by a comparison of the present shrinking outline to a map dated 1786. A strip half a mile wide has been taken off the whole coast since then, and many homes have rerecently been added to the more than 30 villages which are known to have disappeared in the sea.