Discover Dunwich Newsletter Issue 1
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Discover Dunwich Dunwich Museum newsletter Issue 1 2019 Welcome THIS IS the first edition of Discover Dunwich, the newsletter for and by volunteers, staff, trustees and visitors of Dunwich Museum and the Dun- wich community. It is hoped that this publication will come out two or three times a year, in print and (in colour) in a pdf format emailed to those who put their name on a mailing list and accessible via the website. The deadline for the next print Dunwich Museum celebrates 100 years of votes for women – see back page. edition will be 21 April 2019. Sub- mission to: Matt Salusbury, editor, via [email protected] or care of Dunwich Museum, St James St, The Bells! The Bells! Dunwich, Suffolk, IP17 3DT. Phantom bell legends from Dunwich and nationwide Volunteers are always needed at the IS IT true about the bells? Most visitors to how left churches and their bells intact under Museum – contact details are below. Dunwich Museum ask that question, along the waves. The truth was very different. With Matt Salusbury, editor with the other question about whether the the cliffs gradually crumbling away, parish- coastal erosion still continues. ioners would have had many years’ warning DUNWICH MUSEUM The phantom bells at Dunwich, though ob- that their church was approaching the end of 01728 648796 or 07979 vious nonsense, are actually among the more its life, giving them time to strip out the valu- 428058 plausible of Britain’s phantom bell legends, able bells. Dunwich parish records show St manager@ as I discovered when I researched these. At Nicholas’s church had a receipt for the sale of dunwichmuseum.org.uk least churches had actually once stood in its bells to build a pier to protect the original schools bookings: Dunwich – more than can be said for the lo- St James’s church as the sea advanced. cations of many phantom bell legends! There are a few places in the UK where schools@dunwichmuse- Dunwich’s phantom bells peal at night in there actually was a church lost to the sea, um.org.uk some versions of the tradition, while in most besides Dunwich. St Anne’s on Sea in Lan- www.dunwichmuseum. such legends they are heard before a storm, cashire once had one, it’s now off the coast. org.uk or on a particular “holy day.” The bells of the church at Walton-on-the- According to Dunwich Suffolk (Jean and Naze off the Essex coast – taken by the sea Stuart Bacon, 1975) Master Mariner John in the 1790s – are said to warn of incom- Day in 1856 claimed to have known his posi- ing storms. The church is said to have re- MUSEUM OPENING: tion when making for Sizewell Bank by the appeared above the waves briefly in 1928, Reopening for 2019 – tolling of a submerged bell from a church at although Brian Jennings of the Frinton and Dunwich. Walton Heritage Society told me the location February half term: Rowland Parker, author of Men of Dunwich, of the church has never been confirmed and 16 February 2019-24 had “never heard any local talk of bells toll- that witnesses probably misidentified brick ing out to sea” as of 1979. But in a recent en- groynes built out to sea. February 2019, try to the Dunwich Museum enquiries book, Some more plausible phantom bell legends 2pm-4pm. a visitor staying at Dunwich Heath claims come from the Cornish coast. In these it is of- that at the end of 2017 they were woken by ten ships’ bells that toll after they have sunk. Open March weekends short “peals” from bells late at night com- It’s the bell of the ship Neptune that are sup- ing from Dunwich. (The current St James’s posed to ring off the coast at St Ives. 2pm-4pm. Then open Church has a single automated bell that just Unlikely traditions about phantom bells daily 11.30-4.30 from 1st tolls the hour – it can’t ring peals.) include one from Kirksanton in Cumbria, Some visitors imagine Dunwich was swept where a village church is said to have once April 2019 onwards. away in an Atlantis-style tsunami that some- BELLS – see back page Recentitems handed into the findsMuseum by visitors during the 2018 season Pliocene Blue Planet out near Cliff House at low tide mark after a storm Tim Holt-Wilson writes should look for this bed and MRS SANDIE Sheals from Chester re- its fossil debris. It may ex- cently dropped a lump of stony matter tend below beach level fur- off at the Museum. Yellowish-brown in ther north up towards the colour; cylindrical, about 15 inches by village, and may well be the 13; with low protuberances sticking out; source of the whale fossils. a honey-combed texture in places and How old is it? It is likely to looking battered and worn by the sea. be part of the Norwich Crag She found it on the beach fronting Dun- Formation, of early Pleisto- wich Marsh, towards Walberswick. cene age about two million Earlier this year I was given a similar years old, which forms a object found on the beach at Felixs- greater part of the sandy and towe. Having worked on the fossil ver- gravelly cliffs at Dunwich. tebrates at Ipswich Museum, I knew it The whale vertebra (DUWHM: N182) It also includes horizons of ferruginous (iron-rich) sands was the sea-battered centre of a whale ange in colour and heavily mineralised with fossil shells occurring at about vertebra, minus its various lateral and with iron. sea-level at nearby Sizewell. Bits of fer- spinous processes. It had come from There is some interesting 19th century ruginous mudstone can be found on the the Red Crag strata of late Pliocene or information which records a “shell-bed beach and are occasionally handed in at early Pleistocene age (about 2.8 million exposed in the cliff at Dunwich. This the Museum. I suspect they have been years old) which outcrop locally along bed, a red crag, appeared in patches at the derived from this hidden, iron-rich stra- the coast. Curiosity drove me to find out foot of the cliff about 1500 yards south tum. They contain little sparkling flecks more about the Crag whales of Suffolk. of the church-in-ruins…. Mammalian of the mineral mica. I investigated the geological literature remains were also found, and these ap- What was life like in our local cor- and even visited the British Museum of peared to come from a hard ferruginous ner of the Blue Planet in Norwich Crag Natural History, where I met a cetacean bed of clay and sand, shown here and times, about 2 million years ago? The researcher, Dr Travis Park, and spent an there on the beach, some feet below the North Sea was a bight or cul-de-sac, as interesting three hours looking through shell-bed in the cliff” . Mammal remains the Straits of Dover had not yet opened. their collection of Suffolk finds. including whale vertebrae and rib fos- The climate was temperate, and the lo- Whale fossils are often found along the sils had been found, as well as elephant, cation of Dunwich was under water, as coast of Suffolk, as nondescript lumps of horse and rhinoceros bones and teeth. I the sea stretched as far west as Essex and bone. Most useful for researchers are the have never seen an exposure of this ‘red Hertfordshire. Offshore sands were de- dense bones from the inner ear, which crag’ but anyone who finds themselves look rather like knobbly, brown beans with a curled over, ear-like flange on one side. Fossil whale species can be distin- guished on the basis of these bones, so they are definitely worth finding. Our Dunwich specimen (catalogue number N182) is a lumbar or caudal (tail) vertebra, most likely from a small baleen (mysticete, filter feeders, like a blue whale or right whale) or medium- to-large toothed whale (odontocete, like a sperm whale). It is not possible to be more precise. Its colour and state of pres- ervation suggest it may have originated in the Red Crag, but was then perhaps eroded out and incorporated into the later Norwich Crag strata that outcrop at Dunwich, dated about two million years ago. It is in a similar state to the Crag Complete vertebra from a modern whale. Image: Eschricht, DF & whale vertebra (N157) in the display Reinhardt, J. from: Flower, WH (ed). Recent Memoirs of the Ceta- case near the back door of the Museum. There is also a fragment of whale rib, or- cea. Ray Society, London, 1866. Out of copyright posited in the Dunwich area. Sponge Bob dinosaur Next time you are in the Museum and Dunwich Voices pass the whale vertebra near the back contemporary review door, spare a thought for the cetacean (whale) inhabitants of the Blue Planet in Norwich Crag times. They are the ancestors of today’s wonderful whale species. Old bones may have interesting stories to tell. Our vertebra could be from a smaller toothed whale like this one. Photo: Wikimedia Commons I FOUND this strange object on a desert- DVD, Caroline Gay Way, Mindscapes ed stretch of beach between Dingle and On sale in Dunwich Museum Beast from the East Walberswick Sluice in February 2018. loosens ack-ack bits? I had no idea what it was, it resembled A collection including poems (some set to an ancient Greek vase encrusted with music) together with a collage of images, concrete.