HAPPISBURGH, England — Off the coast of Norfolk on edge of the North Sea, the ocean can seem calm, but the waters are deceptive. Beneath the marbled brown lie sand banks and submerged mountains waiting to ensnare unsuspecting ships. Happisburgh (pronounced Hays-burro) is a small, pretty town, its narrow roads lined by houses with walls made of flint pressed into mortar. The beach roads all have names like Stone’s Throw or Cliff Top, and the sea has always been present in people’s lives. But inching ever closer for years, now its incursions are rapid and frightening.
The light changed suddenly. Over my shoulder the sky was dark with rain that towered in hazy columns against a thunderous glow. It rolled over the beach, over the houses, falling into the sea, billowing over the crumbling cliff edge. Lightning split the blackness and the clouds rumbled. Gulls soared like scraps of loose paper and sand martins wheeled in a frenzy, seeking refuge. For a moment, the world had ended. Then it was clear again: sun shining, birds calling, people laughing.
I was looking out to submerged places, out to the infamous Doggerland. Places with names and identities that no longer exist here. Not in the way they used to. Under the water, now lost to the waves, they live on in their cartographic afterlife. Eccles-on-Sea is named after a church, but the original place of worship is long gone, and the collection of bungalows that form the village hunker behind protecting dunes and a sea wall. This is the Bush Estate, a so-called Plotland community, the name given to settlements that emerged during an early 20th century movement of working-class people buying cheap land on the seaside. Most of the houses, along with St. Mary’s church, were washed away in the 17th century; for a time, only the tower remained, the sea creeping closer and sand drifting over the stones at its base. For years, it acted as a sailor’s beacon until it too succumbed to the waves. Now only a fragment of the bottom wall apparently remains visible at a low spring tide, though I did not see it. Dunwich, a thriving port town just to the south along the coast, was swept to sea centuries earlier.
They remain a warning to us all of what may befall a place, consigned to ruin, memory and legend.
We live at a time when endings are all around us. But endings are never straightforward. An ending may be made up of many moments. Sometimes, we don’t know when things have truly receded from our world, and it can be difficult to determine what to care about, how and when. Questions about what to save become terribly real.
Standing on the Norfolk coast, I thought how odd it was to both observe an ending and to be caught up in it. In one sense the decline is apparent and unavoidable: Cliffs have crumbled, houses are gone, the end has happened. But in another, it’s an ending in a constant process of becoming, never starting or finishing, always ongoing. Such a loss carries emotional and philosophical weight across time, where salvation and survival ebb and flow.
The communities here seemed to be in the middle of a slow war, waiting for an enemy who would inevitably arrive no matter what watch they keep. It was an apocalyptic feeling: dark skies, rock defenses, the bones of former homes, tumbledown walls and shattered fences. And yet, the apocalypse seemed simultaneously distant, like a thing of fable, impossible to actually happen.
Writing after World War I, after the destruction wrought on the confidence of Europe, essayist Paul Valéry reflected: “We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace. … But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair. Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were but beautiful vague names.” Yet then he too felt that same fear of collapse after witnessing the horror of war and the devastated world that came after. “We are aware now that a civilisation has the same fragility as a life.” Worlds can end. Choose to look and absence and scars tell stories.
“No one wants to be made to give something up or be told it’s time to surrender.”
“How can we learn to die?” the philosophers Fernando Flores and B. Scot Rousse asked. But confronting us today is not just individual death, nor even the prospect of human extinction, but the possibility of the disappearance of all our ways of life and being. This is what Jonathan Lear called ontological vulnerability, the sense that a world of meaning might collapse. His book “Radical Hope” was focused on the Crow people of the American West and referred to an “uncanny sense of menace … a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name.” As Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow, said shortly before he died in 1932: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”
On the Norfolk coast, the pub, the church, the road and the shop might all soon be gone. Maybe the homes will remain, maybe not. Climate change may not kill everyone, but it may destroy the things that give life meaning. It’s one thing to survive, another to live. When you know that the flood will rush in, the fire will burn, the end is coming, what would you do? And what would you save? One option is to improve defenses: shelter cities and rebuff the rising tide from California to Yorkshire to Pacific islands. Another solution is to move.
In the U.K., the Shoreline Management Plans (SMPs), a series of complex strategic outlines, determine the futures of coastal regions, weighing up priority places to spend money and build walls. They read like military plans. The options are do nothing, maintain defenses, extend defenses or realign coastal assets. Hold the line. Fortify. Resist. Retreat.
In some instances, we have no choice but to protect something because it would do too much damage to leave it undefended. There are nuclear power plants in vulnerable places along the U.K. coast. Sizewell B in Suffolk had been slated to be decommissioned by 2035 but was recently given a new lease of life until 2055; Sizewell C, is newly under construction and due to be operational in the 2030s. It has an elaborate defense plan: raised up on a 7-meter (23-foot) platform with walls. Some say it’s not high enough. Modeling of sea level rise goes to 2140 and doesn’t take into account the long future of nuclear waste. Moreover, walls and floodgates were designed for receding high waters, not permanent rise. They endanger places nearby by preventing the natural movement of sand.
Sellafield, on the Cumbrian Coast, is the most dangerous nuclear site in Europe. It’s always present, the golf ball dome and the chimneys looming in the distance, a crumbling facade behind the farm shops and fells of the Lake District. At night the lights glow with an ominous red haze. It is a hazardous place. High-level waste is stored in legacy silos and ponds. The Magnox Swarf Silo is just leaking into the ground. Just down the road, with armored fences on the edge of people’s homes, is the LLW Repository, the dumping ground for all low-level nuclear waste in the U.K. Long-term, the authorities aim to bury all this in the sea, deep down in a Geological Disposal Facility. But for now, they shore them up against the rising sea because to do otherwise would risk it all leaching out in catastrophic fashion. Toxic waste that never becomes safe and cannot be moved will have to be fortified.
The houses on Braystones Beach below Sellafield will not be afforded the same protection. Once, they were railway carriages that brought and housed the workers to build the line along the coast; now, some have been developed into dwellings. Like the Plotland homes of Norfolk, they are marginal communities, places pushed to the edge. Winter high tides have a 7-meter (23-foot) range, with storms whipping up surging waves, and the row of single-story dwellings will often have the sea lapping at their doors; rocks and buoys, dredged up and dragged into shore, crash against homes. The inhabitants are determined to stay: They like living here in the wildness and wind. It’s part of the attraction, one woman told me, but they have resorted to building their own walls by claiming boulders and piling gravel and stones into embankments in front of their homes. I stood on the hill above and the small low-slung huts looked like a wall surrounding a fortress, a kind of defense protecting the aging nuclear plant. The Cumbria Coastal Strategy is dismissive of the value of the huts: “The majority of the frontage is undefended and there is no economic justification to providing significant investment at the present time.”
Famously, in 2019, the media condemned a seaside village in Wales called Fairbourne to be abandoned to the sea. House prices plummeted overnight, investment trickled away and the residents were labeled as Britain’s first climate refugees. Locals mobilized against the process of “managed retreat,” but the reputational damage was done and trust was destroyed. Insurance policies, which after all are a bet on the future, often will no longer cover homes in these coastal places.
“Choose to look and absence and scars tell stories.”
There are already ruins and remnants aplenty on the Norfolk coast. It’s littered with the remains of Norman castles and military lookouts. Of all the things we could protect, is it worth saving ruins? Should we simply let them be committed to the memory of the sea? They are more than crumbling walls or upturned pillboxes — they are reminders of our past, anchors that root us to a sense of history and landscape. Just like with everything else, there’ll only be certain ruins designated as important and worth protecting. This is true of any heritage site, not just those threatened by climate change. As Gavin Lucas writes, “entropy is a social as well as a natural phenomenon.”
A recent National Trust report admitted it could not contain threats to coastal sites and aims to work “with the grain of nature.” On the coast of Caithness in Scotland’s far northeast, there are castles at every bay and promontory exposed to the ravages of the sea. One, Castle Sinclair Girnigoe, an impressive northern fortress, was listed on the World Monument Fund’s Monuments Watch in 2002. The complex of structures, dating back to the 15th century and once owned by Clan Sinclair, has received funds to stabilize and conserve the structure. Just along the coast, however, is Castle Bucholie, listed by Historic Environment Scotland, but without the same resources to protect it from its fate.
“Old” ruins were once homes or lives. The world is ephemeral. Preservation suggests we can protect things in the future by putting them on lists, but that’s not really true. The Caithness castles lean into the sea, and the empty windows look out to the water like screaming faces. Girnigoe Sinclair reopened with much fanfare in 2010, but the slow creep of time continues regardless of how much attention is given to it. Transience may be an opportunity to tell complex stories though; “managed ruination” can be a way to write what the cultural geographer Caitlin DeSilvey refers to as an “anticipatory history” of absence.
When I visited, Castle Sinclair’s wooden drawbridge was closed and the walls were covered in scaffolding. It is being reclaimed not just by the sea but by nature. Nesting fulmars stared from a window, and marsh orchids were growing out of the turf that covered the ruined walls.
Sea level rise and climate change threaten the nonhuman world, too. I saw ringed plovers on the beach near Sellafield, sand martins on the crumbling cliffs of the Norfolk coast. Signs warn people away from their nesting sites.
Norfolk’s water systems — the great expanses of the Broads, mudflats and marshes — are increasingly susceptible to the incursion of salty waves. The complex estuarine networks are like arteries that get pumped full of seawater when storm surges come. Salty waters kill invertebrates on which nesting waders feed, and wash away habitat.
Nonhuman environments are being squeezed, but who wants to save the sand martins or the butterflies when homes and businesses are at risk? Something must be sacrificed, and “sacrifice zone” is a term becoming increasingly common in discussions about environmental justice. It’s a word in the language of sanctity, martyrdom and faith — an act of giving something up to a higher purpose, to a god or to a devil. It asks that we think about death as something. It asks that we consider who to make a victim. If we build sea walls, we destroy marshland. If we protect nuclear waste, we condemn coastal communities.
No one wants to be made to give something up or be told it’s time to surrender. As I talked to people in Norfolk, Cumbria and Scotland, the rising sea was ever present in their minds, yet they were also persistent and stubborn. This was their home. What else were they supposed to do?
Part of the problem is that ends are not neat, and these are really debates about when an ending is inevitable, when it is declared and who gets to declare it. Sometimes the world may come and go in an instant but more often there is a slow disintegration of crumbling and drifting. Despite it all, it’s not easy to leave the thing that gives your world meaning and stability.
On a beach railing I found on the coast of Norfolk, there’s a sticker of a man. Rocks and flowers are arranged around the picture, with words of affectionate remembrance. Nearby is a bench with an inscription to a young biker who loved the view of the sea. The bench and the flowers will be gone soon, such small but momentous reminders of the persistence of love and memory in absence. Is this the time, when past and memory are done, when “nothing happens”?
“Sometimes the world may come and go in an instant but more often there is a slow disintegration of crumbling and drifting.”
Because that’s the thing about these decisions. They are not just cold calculations, but about love, even when an end comes. The residents in Happisburgh and nearby Mundesley are worried about the churches that are threatened by the sea, which will undermine the graves of their family members and community. At St. Mary’s in Happisburgh, there’s a mass grave for sailors who drowned in the deep. Their bones are now being returned to the sea, and with them the memory of their lives.
I wandered into the church and saw a woman tending to the flowers on the altar, a wheelbarrow full of blooms next to her. In a pew, a man sat watching her as the sun streamed in through the glass, illuminating the dancing dust. Richard and Joan have lived and worked here all their lives, both baptized in the centuries-old font.
“One day the sea will take it.” That’s what she says. She knows this is true but she tends the church anyway because it is part of her past. It dates to the 14th century; its peal of eight bells ring every Wednesday. There are legends around here that you can hear the drowned bells of Dunwich or Eccles-on-Sea. I’ve heard a similar tale of the mythical city of Ys, submerged beneath the waves, whose cathedral bell still rings.
There’s another bell on the beach at Happisburgh, designed by artist Marcus Vergette, that rings with the tide. Vergette told me that the bell was the perfect design for the sea. Bells disrupt space. They have a history and personality; they have names. Bells rang for death and life, funeral and marriage, celebration, announcement, mourning or warning. They communicate the passing of time and the ritual of life, and a bell’s back and forthness expresses the liminality of the coast. It is, he said, a particularly suitable form for the shifting sands of life, and to express the ambiguity of loss and desire.
I stood on the beach and listened to it. It tolled for time, for tide, for life and death. It was a liturgy of loss, but it was also a celebration and a call to joy and worship, perhaps even hope or the new dawn of a day.
What hope could it ring for? Lear believed in the vulnerability of our world but also a kind of radical hope even in absence and loss. Perhaps those places that are gone could have an afterlife. Recently archaeologists recorded oral histories around Happisburgh and scanned and 3D-photographed the church so it can live on in some form. Whole countries are adopting this approach. Tuvalu, a Pacific Island nation comprising small islets and low-lying atolls, is aiming to become the first “digital nation.” Seen from the air it is a ring of land in a backdrop of blue, a thin coral halo sinking rapidly. Tuvalu will not accept its fate as a victim; it will not just give into the inevitable end handed to it by the global forces of destruction.
Radical hope is possible, Lear writes, because we can have courage. Courage is an important virtue because it recognizes that we are “finite erotic creatures. … As finite creatures we are vulnerable: we may suffer physical and emotional injury, we may make significant mistakes, even the concepts with which we understand ourselves and the world may collapse — and yet as erotic creatures we reach out to the world and try to embrace it.”
I caught the last light of the day at the church in Mundesley. The golden sun escaped from underneath the granite clouds and it washed the world gold. Just for a moment. A great rainbow arced overhead, a sign of hope and peace after the storm, the color that returned after the biblical flood.
There may not be a world of pure hope for these coastal villages, because there will be losses. Even with an ending, we can consider what practices of courage, care and value to adopt, and what can be salvaged as we build defenses, remember and protect elsewhere. The economy of salvation is never straightforward, so reach out and embrace the world even as it disappears.
The post What We Can Save In A Time Of Endings appeared first on NOEMA.