_The Lost City of Suffolk – Britain’s Atlantis

Today, it is in the North Sea in the Sole Bay, midway between seaside towns Southwold and Aldeburgh, just off the coast of the Suffolk Coast and Heaths National Landscape. Scientists in the last twenty years have discovered that it wasn’t lost at all – it's simply underwater.

Now a tiny village with one main street, a pub and a few houses, it’s difficult to imagine that Dunwich was once one of the biggest, most populous ports in the country – the size of the City of London's square mile.

Dunwich was a powerful trading outpost, built on fishing, trade and religious patronage, that also made warships for the king’s navy – until devastating storms took it under the sea.

Clues to Dunwich’s medieval history can be found in the tiny museum devoted to its fascinating history and by the remains of a 13th-century Franciscan friary, Greyfriars, on the edge of the cliff and a Leper Hospital chapel in the present churchyard.

The last church, All Saints, tumbled from the cliffs at the turn of the 20th century. Bones from its graveyard still sometimes fall out of the crumbling cliff, adding to the eerie, ghostly quality of days when sea frets drift in from the bay and linger in the liminal space between water and land.

It’s even said that on a quiet day you can still hear the church bells mournfully emanating from beneath the waves.

How was Suffolk's Lost City found

It was thought that the legend of ‘Britain’s Atlantis’ was a myth, a romantic tale of a city beneath the waves, until underwater surveying in the 1970s hinted there was something offshore.

In 2008 new sonar technology discovered the ‘lost city’ – medieval ruins in the murky depths just a short distance from the shoreline, including Blackfriars Friary, St. Peter’s Church and the Chapel of St Katherine.

Today, it is the world's largest medieval underwater town site, extending to the estimated coastline of the year 1050, about 1500 metres from the present shore, although much of it is beneath a shifting sandbank.

Over the centuries Dunwich has been a Roman fort, the capital of a Saxon Kingdom, a naval port and the base from which St Felix of Burgundy, the first Bishop of Dunwich, converted East Anglia to Christianity from 630.

As a medieval religious centre, it had numerous large churches, monasteries, hospitals, grand public buildings including one for the Knights Templar and even a mint. In 1154, Dunwich had 19 churches, two monasteries, and two hospitals. At its peaks its population matched London.

Its citizens grew wealthy from trade, shipbuilding and a fishing fleet of seventy boats. The port enjoyed trade with France, the Netherlands and Germany and as far away as Spain and Iceland.

What happened to Suffolk's Lost City

Things began to change on January 1, 1286 when a storm surge hit the sheltered harbour and destroyed buildings. There were two further surges the following year, the South England flood of February 1287 and St Lucia's flood in December, both wreaking damage to Dunwich.

A devastating storm in 1347 washed away 400 homes and another, The Grote Mandrenke (The Great Drowning of Men), in January 1362 destroyed what was left.

Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe wrote, ‘A certaine peculiar spite and envie of Nature, that suffereth the greedy sea to have what it will’.

The Times, in 1885, wrote of Dunwich: ‘That now forgotten and obsolete port where Bishop Felix once fixed the Episcopal stool of the East Anglian realm, whose very site is now long since swallowed up by the encroaching sea.’

Eventually, even the river left Dunwich – it now runs parallel to the seashore and joins the River Blyth at Walberswick. It’s a popular place to go crabbing. Have a meal or stay at The Anchor.

So, unlike Atlantis, we know where the port of Dunwich is. And if you want to get a sense of the size of medieval Dunwich, then visit the excellent museum which has a reconstructed model, based on a 16th century map of the port. Hard to imagine that it’s all still there – tantalisingly just a few hundred metres away under the waves, just where old storytellers said it would be.

There's good accommodation nearby at School Farm Cottages, Mollett's Farm and Mill Hill Farm Caravan and Camping Park.

Plan your stay on the Suffolk Coast