The Rings of Saturn (14 page)

It was as if I had been walking for hours before the tiled roofs of houses and the crest of a wooded hill gradually became defined. The Dunwich of the present day is what remains of a town that was one of the most important ports in Europe in the Middle Ages. There were more than fifty churches, monasteries and convents, and hospitals here; there were shipyards and fortifications and a fisheries and merchant fleet of eighty vessels; and there were dozens of windmills. All of it has gone under, quite literally, and is now below the sea, beneath alluvial sand and gravel, over an area of two or three square miles. The parish churches of St James, St Leonard, St Martin, St Bartholomew, St Michael, St Patrick, St Mary, St John, St Peter, St Nicholas and St Felix, one after the other, toppled down the steadily receding cliff-face and sank in the depth, along with the earth and stone of which the town had been built. All that survived, strange to say, were the walled well shafts, which for centuries, freed of that which had once enclosed them, rose aloft like the chimney stacks of some subterranean smithy,
as various chroniclers report, until in due course these symbols of the vanished town also fell down. Until about 1890 what was known as Eccles Church Tower still stood on Dunwich beach,

and no one had any idea how it had arrived at sea level, from the considerable height at which it must once have stood, without tipping out of the perpendicular. The riddle has not been solved to this day, though a recent experiment using a model suggests that the enigmatic Eccles Tower was probably built on sand and sank down under its own weight, so gradually that the masonry remained virtually intact. Around 1900, after Eccles Tower had also collapsed, the only Dunwich church that remained was the ruin of All Saints.

In 1919 it, too, slipped over the cliff edge, together with the bones of those buried in the churchyard, and only the square west tower still rose for a time above those eerie parts. Dunwich reached the high point of its evolution in the thirteenth century. Every day, in those times, the ships came and went, to London, Stavoren, Stralsund, Danzig, Bruges, Bayonne and Bordeaux. A quarter of the great fleet that sailed from Portsmouth in May 1230, bearing hundreds of knights and their horses, several thousand foot soldiers, and the entire royal entourage, came from Dunwich. Shipbuilding, and the trade in timber, grain, salt, herring, wool and hides, were so profitable that the town was soon in a position to build every conceivable kind of defence against attack from the landward side and against the force of the sea, which was ceaselessly eroding the coast. One cannot say how great was the sense of security which the people of Dunwich derived from the building of these fortifications. All we know for certain is that they ultimately proved inadequate. On New Year's Eve 1285, a storm tide devastated the lower town and the portside so terribly that for months afterwards no one could tell where the land ended and the sea began. There were fallen walls, debris, ruins, broken timbers, shattered
ships' hulls, and sodden masses of loam, pebbles, sand and water everywhere. And then on the 14th of January 1328, after only a few decades of rebuilding, and following an autumn and Christmas period that had been unusually tranquil, an even more fearful disaster occurred, if such were possible. Once again, a hurricane-force north-easterly storm coincided with the highest tide of the month. As darkness fell, those living around the harbour fled with whatever belongings they could carry to the upper town. All night the waves clawed away one row of houses after another. Like mighty battering rams the roofing and supporting beams adrift in the water smashed against the walls that had not yet been levelled. When dawn came, the throng of survivors – numbering some two or three thousand, among them gentry such as the FitzRicharts, the FitzMaurices, the Valeins and the de la Falaises as well as the common people – stood on the edge of the abyss, leaning into the wind, gazing in horror through the clouds of salt spray into the depths where bales and barrels, shattered cranes, torn sails of windmills, chests and tables, crates, feather beds, firewood, straw and drowned livestock were revolving in a whirlpool of whitish-brown waters. Over the centuries that followed, catastrophic incursions of the sea into the land of this kind happened time and again, and, even during long years of apparent calm, coastal erosion continued to take its natural course. Little by little the people of Dunwich accepted the inevitability of the process. They abandoned their hopeless struggle, turned their backs on the sea, and, whenever their declining means allowed it, built to the westward in a protracted flight that went on for generations; the slowly dying town thus followed – by reflex, one might say – one of
the fundamental patterns of human behaviour. A strikingly large number of our settlements are oriented to the west and, where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction. The east stands for lost causes. Especially at the time when the continent of America was being colonized, it was noticeable that the townships spread to the west even as their eastern districts were falling apart. In Brazil, to this day, whole provinces die down like fires when the land is exhausted by overcropping and new areas to the west are opened up. In North America, too, countless settlements of various kinds, complete with gas stations, motels and shopping malls, move west along the turnpikes, and along that axis affluence and squalor are unfailingly polarized. I was put in mind of this phenomenon by the Right of Dunwich. After the first serious disaster, building began on the westernmost fringe of the town, but even of the Grey Friars monastery that dates from that time only a few fragments now remain. Dunwich, with its towers and many thousand souls, has dissolved into water, sand and thin air. If you look out from the cliff-top across the sea towards where the town must once have been, you can sense the immense power of emptiness. Perhaps it was for this reason that Dunwich became a place of pilgrimage for melancholy poets in the Victorian age. Algernon Charles Swinburne, for instance, went there on several occasions in the 1870s with his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton, whenever the excitement of London literary life threatened to overtax his nerves, which had been hypersensitive since his early childhood. He had achieved legendary fame as a young man, and many a time he had been sent into such impassioned paroxysms by the dazzling conversations on art in the Pre-Raphaelite salons,
or by the mental strain of composing his own verse and tragedies, overflowing with wonderful poetic bombast, that he could no longer control his own voice and limbs. After these quasi-epileptic fits he often lay prostrate for weeks, and soon, unfitted for general society, he could bear only the company of those who were close to him. Initially he spent the periods of convalescence at the family country estate, but later, ever more frequently, he went to the coast with the trusty Watts-Dunton. Rambles from Southwold to Dunwich, through the windblown fields of sedge, worked like a sedative upon him. A long poem entitled
By the North Sea
was his tribute to the gradual dissolution of life. Like ashes the low cliffs crumble and the banks drop down into dust. I remember reading in a study of Swinburne that, one summer evening, when he was visiting the churchyard of All Saints with Watts-Dunton, he thought he saw a greenish glow far out on the surface of the sea. The glow, he is reported as saying, reminded him of the palace of Kublai Khan, which was built on the site later occupied by Peking at the very time when Dunwich was one of the most important communities in the kingdom of England. If I remember rightly, that same study told how Swinburne described every last detail of the fabled palace to Watts-Dunton that evening: the snow-white wall more than four miles in length, the arsenals crammed with bridles, saddles and armour of every sort, the storehouses and treasuries, the stables where row upon row of the finest horses stood, the banqueting halls that could accommodate more than six thousand, the private apartments, the zoo with its unicorn enclosure, and the hill, three hundred feet high, that the Khan had caused to be raised on the north side, in order to command an
unrestricted view. Within the space of a year, Swinburne reputedly said, this new landmark, the slopes of which were strewn with green lapis lazuli, was planted with the rarest and most majestic of mature evergreen trees, which had been dug up complete with roots and earth from where they originally grew and transported, often over considerable distances, by specially trained teams of elephants. Never before, Swinburne is said to have claimed that evening in Dunwich, nor ever since, had anything more beautiful been created on earth than that artificial hill, which was green even in midwinter and crowned by a palace of peace, in a similar hue of green. Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose life was coterminous to the year with that of the Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi, was born on the 5th of April 1837, the eldest of the six children of Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne and his wife, Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham. Both families traced their ancestry to that remote time when Kublai Khan was building his palace and Dunwich was trading with every nation that could then be reached by sea. As long as anyone could remember, the Swinburnes and the Ashburnhams had been members of the royal entourage, prominent commanders and warriors, lords of vast estates, and explorers. Curious to relate, one General Robert Swinburne, great uncle to Algernon Swinburne, became a subject of His Apostolic Majesty and was invested a Baron of the Holy Roman Empire, presumably on the strength of his pronounced ultramontane leanings. When he died he was governor of Milan, and his son, until his death in 1907 at the age of eighty-seven, held the office of chamberlain to Kaiser Franz Josef. This extreme manifestation of political Catholicism
in one branch of the family may conceivably have been a first sign of decadence. That aside, however, the question remains of how a family so adept at life should have produced a scion forever on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a paradox which long puzzled Swinburne's biographers as they eagerly teased at his family descent and hereditary make-up, till at length they agreed to describe the poet of
Atalanta in Calydon
as an epigenetic phenomenon sprung from the void, as it were, from beyond all natural possibility. It is certain that Swinburne, by reason of his physical appearance alone, must have seemed a complete aberration.