It's 180km, so you do need to be reasonably fit. I was on it each year from 2008-2014. Options on the way back are (were?) book a seat on a bus, ride to Saxmundham and get the train from there, ride to Ipswich and get the train from there, or (if you're really fit), ride home. There are a few things to see when you get there, the ruins of Greyfriars Priory, a leper hospital, and a museum.
I highly recommend this ride, it is so much fun. Just make sure you book the transport back and don't hope to get a train or public transport, just too many people!
The "land" that was (and is) being eaten away by the sea - at a seemingly furious pace - is not good bedrock. Nor even "White Cliffs of Dover" soft chalk. It is a mix of sand, clay, random rocks, and such - which glacial action piled up during ice ages. And is now washing away like a big sand castle on the beach, as gravity and a bit of wave action do their natural duties.
I'm rehabilitating a piece of severely compacted alluvial sand/silt. On a dry day I damaged a pick trying to take soil samples. It was like concrete. I could see how someone would think it was stable enough to build upon.
But now it's wet much of the year, and soft and squishy. I can dig holes with a trowel, and a delivery truck left ruts trying to drop off materials. Not so stable after all.
A Danish one, too, teetering on the brink.
If you walk down the stairs to the right of the church, down on the beach you can make out a thin, greyish horizontal line in the white chalk of the cliffs, gunsmoke from the big thing which disturbed dinosaur tranquility. This is one of the places the Alvarez'es went - around 1980 - to collect their evidence.
One of the maps in the article is titled "Northern Sea or German Ocean". I never heard "German Ocean" before. Did they mean the "Deutsche Bucht" (German Bay)?
> Before the adoption of "North Sea", the names used in English were "German Sea" or "German Ocean", referred to as the Latin names "Mare Germanicum" and "Oceanus Germanicus", and these persisted in use until the First World War.
There are many ways to preserve and even extend shoreline. It's just too bad that coastal engineering technology was 400 years too late for this old town.
> This city was once the same physical size as the City of London with a population, in its late-thirteenth-century heyday, of around ten thousand, before it was savagely diminished by two calamitous sea-storms in 1288 and 1328 initiating a process of coastal erosion that would plunge much of the city off the cliff in the succeeding, sorrowful centuries.
The map in that article was very confusing as compared to Google Maps until I realized that the "dashed lines" representing the modern coastline are the dashed black lines, not the dashed red lines. Moreover, the land area grew.
my uncle used to say, invest in land, it's the only thing they're not making any more of. he would probably call volcanic islands the exception that proves the rule.
It's a free annual bike ride where 1000s ride from Hackney in East London through the night to Dunwich beach.
With many pubs along the way staying open all night and locals putting out little candles it's a magical ride that anyone can do.
(Oh, and it's pronounced Dun-ige to rhyme with midge not Dun-which for anyone wondering.)
https://www.dunwichdynamo.co.uk/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunwich_Dynamo