."

The incursions of the sea at Aldborough, were formerly very destructive,
and this borough is known to have been once situated a quarter of a mile
east of the present shore. The inhabitants continued to build farther
inland, till they arrived at the extremity of their property, and then
the town decayed greatly; but two sand-banks, thrown up at a short
distance, now afford a temporary safeguard to the coast. Between these
banks and the present shore, where the current now flows, the sea is
twenty-four feet deep on the spot where the town formerly stood.

_Essex._--Harwich is said to have owed its rise to the destruction of
Orwell, a town which stood on the spot now called "the west rocks," and
was overwhelmed by an inroad of the sea since the Conquest.
Apprehensions have been entertained that the isthmus on which Harwich
stands may at no remote period become an island, for the sea may be
expected to make a breach near Lower Dover Court, where Beacon Cliff is
composed of horizontal beds of London clay containing septaria. It had
wasted away considerably between the years 1829 and 1838, at both which
periods I examined this coast. In that short interval several gardens
and many houses had been swept into the sea, and in April, 1838, a whole
street was threatened with destruction. The advance of the sea is much
accelerated by the traffic carried on in septaria, which are shipped off
for cement as fast as they fall down upon the beach. These stones, if
allowed to remain in heaps on the shore, would break the force of the
waves and retard the conversion of the peninsula into an island, an
event which might be followed by the destruction of the town of Harwich.
Captain Washington, R. N., ascertained in 1847, that Beacon Cliff, above
mentioned, which is about fifty feet high, had given way at the rate of
forty feet in forty-seven years, between 1709 and 1756; eighty feet
between 1756 and 1804; and three hundred and fifty feet between the
latter period and 1841; showing a rapidly accelerated rate of
destruction.[411]

Among other losses it is recorded that, since the year 1807, a field
called the Vicar's Field, which belonged to the living of Harwich, has
been overwhelmed;[412] and in the year 1820 there was a considerable
space between the battery at Harwich, built in the beginning of the
present century, and the sea; part of the fortification had been swept
away in 1829, and the rest then overhung the water.

At Walton