Waves lap the seashore and seabirds wheel and swoop where once a village stood, old Dunwich is said to have extended another seven miles beyond its current boundaries.  Back in the 12th century Dunwich was a thriving port and a place of major trade.  It had churches, chapel and rich merchant houses all enclosed behind high city walls.  Its fishermen fished in Icelandic waters and Dunwich was the capital city of East Anglia.

However, all this changed in the 13th century when the majority of the city disappeared under the sea.  The culprit a high spring tide which swept into old Dunwich, literally burying it under the sea as well as silting up the harbour. The people of Dunwich fought back and dug out the harbour but over the next hundreds of years Dunwich reduced in size to the present petite village we see today.

There is a village teashop, village inn and a tiny but interesting museum which gives details of how Dunwich looked in the old days. Including a model representing the town of the 12th century.

Nearby Dunwich Heath is a wonderful nature reserve with over 200 acres of sandy cliffs, heath and beach.
In the grounds of the remaining church there are the ruins of a medieval hospital which looked after people with leprosy.
In 1175 the church ordered that lepers were not allowed to live in towns, so isolated hospitals were built to cope with this public health problem. 

Also in the churchyard corner is the last buttress of All saints church a 14th century church which closed in 1778.
The rest of the church fell over the cliff between 1904 and 1919 but its last buttress was rebuilt here in 1923. The word Dunwich means a port with deep water.


They say that sometimes you can see the bones from the graveyard of old St. James church poking out of the still-crumbling cliff.

The cannon is one of a number that were around in Dunwich until the 1939-45 war when most of them were taken away. This one survived and re-appeared a few years ago. Where it was originally in use and how it came to Dunwich are not known.

Dingle Marshes is one of only a handful of sites in England where the tiny starlet sea anemone is found. Despite its national rarity it can occur in very large numbers sometimes more than 10,000 per square metre.

Locals say that on still quiet days you can hear the old church bells tolling out for their drowned parishioners.