If you\u2019ve encountered one of England\u2019s thin places, you\u2019ll know what I\u2019m referring to: an eerie, liminal sense\u00a0of things just out of eyeshot, of eyes watching you from the grass. This tends to be more associated with Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland: the uplands and borderlands\u00a0less thoroughly rationalized, mapped, and subdued. But the rich tradition of artists, writers, composers and eccentrics who have fled (and still flee) to Suffolk\u2019s big skies attests to the distinctive way this region\u2019s own special landscape is still thick with fairies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis green and pleasant land still has its own elemental power; its own quiet but overwhelming force.\u201d<\/p>\n
Think of the estuaries, where sea and sky, fresh and salt, blend imperceptibly into one another. The long cry of the curlew. Half-rotted wood, sunk in mud, clung with limpets and moss. These are English thin places that sing to something just as liminal in the English, as a people: a paradoxical love of home, but also of longing for the open sea. This is a people that looks out beyond the estuaries, the salt tang, and sucking mud \u2014 but also back at cottages, cozy pubs, and warm firesides. Suffolk captures that restless yearning for the horizon, long ground into\u00a0the seafaring English psyche<\/a>, and the same people\u2019s island-dwelling love of home.<\/p>\n Much more than any twee nonsense about Paddington, or tea, or manners, the paradoxical, slightly melancholy experience of desiring both these things at the same time is at the heart of what it means to be English. And Dunwich is, in this sense, especially liminal and melancholy, because even before this summer\u2019s fire most of it was already lost.<\/p>\n During the Anglo-Saxon period prior to the Norman invasion, Dunwich was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles. A thriving port covering an area similar in scale to, though smaller in population than, medieval London, it was listed in the Domesday Book as having three churches. Historians estimate its population at that time as around 3,000. In the 13th century, a Franciscan friary was built on the nearby headland. But then climate disaster struck.<\/p>\n A storm surge in the late 13th century repeatedly battered the region, flooding the port and gnawing at the coastline. The harbor silted up. The shore changed shape. And, importantly, the river\u00a0that\u00a0was the town\u2019s\u00a0raison d\u2019\u00eatre moved. Dunwich was suddenly no longer a sheltered harbor, sitting at the meeting-point of the river and the sea. Now the river was more than a mile away, winding through a different estuarial flat. The town lost its purpose. Further floods swept more homes into the sea. No one rebuilt them; people moved on.<\/p>\n Now, Dunwich is a tiny coastal village, home to around 200 people, a chip shop, and (temporarily, once a year) a lot of London cyclists. They gather every summer (the last event was a couple of weeks ago) to ride overnight from London Fields to Dunwich Beach, in the cult-like \u201cDunwich Dynamo<\/a>\u201d bike ride, known by the nutters who participate as the \u201cDun Run\u201d.<\/p>\n The first time I visited Dunwich I was in the heady early stages of falling in love. We arrived there and were caught as instantly by the otherworldly atmosphere, as by the sea breeze. It was a bright day; we sat on the shingle watching the North Sea roll in, blue and brown, as passing dogs leaped in and out of the waves.<\/p>\n We built towers from the smooth rocks on the beach, dozed, dreamed amid the whisper and roar of wind and water. Hours slipped by. Time works differently there. The fairy denizens of Dunwich may not be those of green cliffs and woodland, of the kind you might still sense in (say) north Wales, or Cornwall. But they\u2019re there. Dunwich attracts a stream of visitors so dedicated that despite its tiny population, its beachside and chip shop do a roaring trade. This isn\u2019t just mad London cyclists.\u00a0It\u2019s that people come to be, for a little while, at the edge of everything.<\/p>\n A popular local legend has it that on foggy nights, you can hear the sound of church bells ringing over the water, from the town that fell into the sea. I\u2019ve never experienced this, but it feels profoundly true, in the sense that Dunwich is thronged with shades. The ruins of its friary can still be seen, and visited, on the headland \u2014 and here, too, many report strange happenings:\u00a0weird lights<\/a>\u00a0bobbing about the ruins at night, said by some to be the mysterious\u00a0Hobby Lanterns<\/a> or jack-o\u2019-lanterns, unexplained lights reported to lead travelers toward cliff-edges or other dangers. Others report seeing ghostly monks<\/a>\u00a0pacing the ruins, or hearing their chants.<\/p>\n Since that first visit I\u2019ve returned as often as I can just to sit at that eastern edge of England, between sea and sky. The coastline itself feels ethereal: its very history attests to how little faith we really can place on the ground staying solid beneath us. But perhaps this summer\u2019s blazes are less a departure from that ancient Dunwich story, than a continuation of it.<\/p>\n This is a part of England that\u2019s always been thin, elemental, and only tenuously mastered by its inhabitants. War history aficionados sometimes visit Dunwich to explore the concrete bunkers that still stand along that coast, half-eroded by salt and wind, from wartime preparations for a seaborne invasion that, mercifully, never came. Its still earlier ruins were left following an invasion not borne by sea, but\u00a0by the sea itself.<\/p>\n All those centuries ago, the devouring sea, and changing coastline, shrugged off an entire habitation. This time, it was a fire that drove its human inhabitants away. I dare say they\u2019ll be back; but perhaps we should heed the warning. We\u2019ve grown used to an England so domesticated, industrialized, controlled and controllable as to render this kind of abrupt eviction\u00a0by the landscape itself\u00a0all but unimaginable. We tend simply to take for granted the belief we\u2019ve mastered all those elemental forces, permanently, such that worrying about fire, or flood, or erosion is merely a thing of our more primitive past, or something that happens to people in other countries.<\/p>\n Even contemporary responses to climate change don\u2019t really depart from this complacency. Manmade climate change is real. But wherever some kind of coordinated policy effort emerges, to respond to it, in practice this only ever seems to produce more and different technological efforts: more solar farms, different cars, a thicket of new rules.<\/p>\n What if the response we actually need is to think differently? Periodically some bushy-bearded Merlin type will bob to the surface of the mediasphere to warn that what we should be doing is not building more or different stuff,\u00a0but attending more closely to the thin places, and what they have to tell us. No one ever listens, or if they do, somehow the product is only ever more or different stuff.<\/p>\n I could respond to the fire in Dunwich with a threnody for a landscape that has shaped my summers, and my imagination of England, for my whole adult life. A place I love deeply, caught as it is between land and water, singing so evocatively of both salt air, deep England, and all our accumulated centuries of ghosts. But I find that instead I read this as a wake-up call from the still\u00a0deeper\u00a0England, the land that was there when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and will still be there long after we \u2014 and whoever comes after us \u2014 are gone.<\/p>\n However mild and generous\u00a0that land is, for the most part, now and then it too can still shrug, as though scratching an itch \u2014 and, in doing so, dislodge whoever or whatever was there at that moment. Anyone who claims the right to call this land home would do well to listen. To spend time in its thin places, hear what they have to tell us, and mend our lives accordingly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a mournful refrain among the English that all the fairies have left these islands. 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Dunwich Friary: \u2018People report seeing ghostly monks pacing the ruins, or hearing their chants.\u2019 (Heritage Images\/Getty)<\/p>\n