Reasons For Different Protection.
Dunwich is a small coastal village on the Suffolk coast. There are only 120 people living in Dunwich, consisting mainly of retired people but with a few fishermen and forestry workers. With this in mind, there is no real need to protect it from the sea. Although Dunwich was once a major port, almost all of the historic remains have already fallen into the sea.
Another reason for not protecting Dunwich is because the material that is eroded from those cliffs is carried south by long shore drift and helps to prevent erosion further down the coast. This is particularly important with the presence of the Sizewell nuclear power plants 5 miles south of Dunwich. If hard protection were used at Dunwich, then this would cause the cliffs at Sizewell to erode much quicker and possibly cause a risk to the nuclear power plants and the town.
Further South than Sizewell, there is Aldeburgh. Aldeburgh is a small town with a population of around two and a half thousand. Again, this town has been largely affected by erosion, with the town hall, which was once in the middle of the town and is now on the sea front. Just south of Aldeburgh at Slaughden, a spit starts. This spit is called the Orford Spit and it runs down the coast, for over 10 miles, with the river Alde behind it. At the start of the spit, at Slaughden, the spit is at its narrowest point, and with the spit being on the outside of a bend in the river, it is being constantly subjected to erosion. This part of the spit was eroded through in 1981, cutting off the rest of the spit from the mainland. In order to fill the gap, 250,000 m3 of shingle was transported to the site from Orford Ness, 4 miles south of Slaughden.
In order to keep the spit from being cut off, every year more shingle is taken from Orford Ness and deposited at Slaughden.
It is important to keep the spit, because it is one of only four major shingle landforms in Britain. (The others are: Dungeness Kent, a cuspate foreland; Chesil Beach, Dorset a bar; and Culbin Shingle, Highland/Grampian Regions, an offshore barrier island). The spit also has historical importance, with a large proportion of it being acquired by the military in 1913. The site was then drained and levelled so that airfields could be built. From the 1950s, the area was used for experimentation with nuclear power. The ‘pagodas’ used for these experimentations are still in place today (fig 4.3).
The area was also used for top-secret Anglo-American testing of a backscatter radar system called ‘cobra-mist’. (Backscatter radar is used to find military targets that are beyond the horizon by bouncing radar waves off the ionosphere). The cobra-mist site is now being used by BBC world service.
The majority of Orford Spit is now owned by the national trust, and a new type shingle-restoration is being tried to attempt to restore the shingle that has been damaged all the activity that has taken place.
Because of the geological, environmental, scientific, and historical importance of Orford Spit, it is very important that it is kept in its current form so that it can be preserved for the future. If it were to be cut off, it would change the flow of the river Alde, and change the shape of the whole coastline.
As Dunwich has long lost most of its historical sites, it has no reason to be protected as much as, or more than Aldeburgh. The material eroded from Dunwich is naturally used to protect areas further down the coast such as Sizewell with its nuclear power plants. This is why Slaughden and Aldeburgh are being protected much more than Dunwich.