Please read the notes first.
Deep down beneath the surface of the cold North Sea
lies vanished Eccles, inundated, weed encrusted,
where fish swim in through unglazed windows, out through unbarred doors
across the silted squares, where once its busy markets bustled
and where traders, from their stalls, cried out their wares
to customers come thronging through the narrow streets.
But all that busy bustle was long decades gone ago;
today it is a silent settlement of sea creatures
that had no hand in its development,
nor played they any part in the drama of its dereliction,
but there they dwell these days, a conger in a cottage long deceased,
while shoals of mackerel now haunt high hallways in the manor house.
A lobster preaches from the pulpit to lost soles prostrate in the sandy aisles,
while hake and herring hang around the public houses,
shoaling, where there once went strolling, through now silent streets,
fisher-folk by gardens green, where grew red roses and high hollyhocks,
now sown with kelp and dabberlocks, while bladder wrack
proliferates in what was once prize-winning onion patch.
Here is a sea-change Shakespeare never dramatized,
for in his day this Norfolk town stood high and dry,
where now the cliff-tops crumble, their bases breaker-buffeted,
as the North Sea wreaks its vengeance, undeserved,
upon the guiltless land that, with the help of man more culpable,
reclaimed its kingdom briefly, three centuries no more,
when driven ditch, dug deep, and dyke dammed high
The Wash, that brackish marshland, drained down, dry.
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Author Notes
Eccles is one of several communities along the Norfolk coast that either are no more, being completely drowned, or are in the process of going that way. Legends quickly grow up around these inundated places. Almost universal is the one that goes: "... and the seas are rough they say you can still hear the church bells ringing!" And then there was the fisherman whose oar struck the church tower at low tide. The truth is probably less romantic as these places quickly silt up once the sea has reclaimed them.
In the first line of the third stanza is a play on words and not intended to be souls. The sole is a flat fish that likes to lie on the sea bed. Kelp, dabberlocks and bladder wrack are all varieties of seaweed.
The phrase sea-change has been imported into everyday speech to imply a great change in whatever is under discussion. It was coined by William Shakespeare in his play The Tempest, in Ariel's Song.
From the 17th Century attempts have been made to drain the large shallow inlet dividing Norfolk from Lincolnshire, known as The Wash and much of what is now cultivated land was in medieval times under water at least at high tide. King John is said to have lost the crown jewels there while attempting a crossing.
These days, thinking on sea defences has changed and many previously reclaimed areas of the Norfolk coastline are being handed back to the sea as salt marsh to create a buffer zone between the sea and the agricultural land rather than building huge concrete defenses. This practise will also create an excellent habitat for wildfowl as we shall see in the next chapter.
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