re still extant in 1605. When I visited the spot in
1839, the sea was fast encroaching on the sand-hills, and had laid open
on the beach the foundations of a house fourteen yards square, the upper
part of which had evidently been pulled down before it had been buried
under sand. The body of the church has also been long buried, but the
tower still remains visible.

M. E. de Beaumont has suggested that sand-dunes in Holland and other
countries may serve as natural chronometers, by which the date of the
existing continents may be ascertained. The sands, he says, are
continually blown inland by the force of the winds, and by observing the
rate of their march we may calculate the period when the movement
commenced.[406] But the example just given will satisfy every geologist
that we cannot ascertain the starting-point of dunes, all coasts being
liable to waste, and the shores of the Low Countries in particular,
being not only exposed to inroads of the sea, but, as M. de Beaumont
himself has well shown, having even in historical times undergone a
change of level. The dunes may indeed, in some cases, be made use of as
chronometers, to enable us to assign a minimum of antiquity to existing
coast-lines; but this test must be applied with great caution, so
variable is the rate at which the sands may advance into the interior.

Hills of blown sand, between Eccles and Winterton, have barred up and
excluded the tide for many hundred years from the mouths of several
small estuaries; but there are records of nine breaches, from 20 to 120
yards wide, having been made through these, by which immense damage was
done to the low grounds in the interior. A few miles south of
Happisburgh, also, are hills of blown sand, which extend to Yarmouth.
These _dunes_ afford a temporary protection to the coast, and an inland
cliff, about a mile long, at Winterton, shows clearly that at that point
the sea must have penetrated formerly farther than at present.

_Silting up of estuaries_--At Yarmouth, the sea has not advanced upon
the sands in the slightest degree since the reign of Elizabeth. In the
time of the Saxons, a great estuary extended as far as Norwich, which
city, is represented; even in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
as "situated on the banks of an arm of the sea." The sands whereon
Yarmouth is built, first became firm and habitable ground about the year
1008, from which time a line of dunes has gradually increased in height
and