this contingency of the waves playing the
part of bone-grubbers and resurrection-men:

           "[September 8th, 1832]

"Sleep, stranger, sleep within thy narrow bed,
  Till earth and sea shall both give up their dead."

At Beeston Regis is a wooden gravestone,,
with a painted inscription to the memory of
one Ann Platon; which I could, but will not.
bring in as evidence of the belief, that a stone
one might outlast the land between it and
the approaching enemy; neither will I adduce
it in proof of the very Platon-ic affection that
caused such a perishable monument to be
erected, because poverty, perhaps, was stronger
than love. The sum of all is, that the maps of
Norfolk and Suffolk, to be correct, require to
undergo an annual paring and clipping.

In Evelyn's Diary for October 17, 1671,
he mentions his visit to Sir Thomas Browne,
who, "amongst other curiosities, had a collection
of the eggs of all the fowl and birds he
could procure, that country (especially the
promontory of Norfolk) being frequented, as
he said, by several kinds which seldom or
never go farther into the land, as cranes,
storks, eagles, and a variety of water-fowl."
A future diarist, writing as many years
after the present date as John Evelyn
wrote before it, will have to describe—not
the promontory—but the Bay of Norfolk,
frequented by lobsters and crabs, soles and
turbots, shrimps and sand-dabs, fishermen and
dredging naturalists. The Bay of Norfolk is
already formed; as is visible to the naked
eye of any one who will take a view, from the
Sheringham hills, of the low point stretching
out into the sea beyond Weybourne from
Cley, and will then cast a bird's-eye glance
from the Paston Hill near Mundesley, on the
Happisburgh Ness to the eastward. It seems
a paradox that lofty shores should fall before
the sea, the loftiest the fastest, as at
Trimingham and Sidestrand, while the low shingly
and sandy beaches resist its inroads, and even
gain upon it. This, however, is always the
case. In the description of lands appropriated
to the Priory of Broomholme, the ruins of
which still stand in Bacton, are the names of
many places which are now quite obsolete, the
sites on which they once stood being now
occupied by the ocean. The greater part of
Eccles, with, the Manor of Gilham Hall and
Whimpwell, have been swallowed up by
inundations of the sea. It is calculated that
Happisburgh Church will be engulphed
before the close of the present century. The
village of Shipden, with its church, dedicated
to St. Peter, which lay between Cromer and
the sea, has wholly disappeared.

The altitude of this line of cliffs is very
various. At Bacton they are, in places, only
a few feet high—so low, that an active boy
would jump from their top to the sandy beach
beneath, without presuming to consider that
he had performed any great feat. Elsewhere,
as at Trimingham, Cromer, and Sheringham,
they attain from two to three hundred leet
above the level of the sea. In such cases,
they become really fine objects of scenery.
There are not only hills to vary the landscape,
but those hills are split in halves for the
convenience of our inspecting their contents. But
multitudes of respectable East Anglians are
quite ignorant that such grand operations of
Nature are to be witnessed, within reach of
half a day's drive. I only became aware of
the phenomena by personal discovery.

The cliffs themselves are composed of
different earths ( or "till," containing boulders)
deposited in irregular strata, which look as if
they had been formed at the bottom of some
ancient lake, or sea, or estuary; for a certain
portion of the mass cannot be distinctly
referred to either the fresh water or marine
formations. The whole of its organic remains
appear to have been washed from other
formations to be deposited in it, and it contains,
mingled with them, fragments of almost every
rock of the secondary and primary series;
comprehending immense blocks of granite,
porphyry, greenstone, oolite, lias, chalk,
pebbles, trap, and sandstones of various
kinds, besides others. The beach, therefore,
is a perfect museum for the lapidary and the
specimen-hunter to ransack free of charge.
Cornelians and agates often come to hand;
fragments of belemnites, or thunderbolts in
local phrase, are common. Now and then,
beneath the whole mass, sometimes below
high water mark, is a stratum of peat, or
even of fossil wood and lignite. How the
enormous load was laid above it, or that
beneath it, is a puzzle to wiser heads than
mine. The remark of Sir Charles Lyell is,
that in no other part of our island, or perhaps
in Europe, are there evidences of local
disturbances on so grand a scale, and of an
equally modern date.

Loam, various clays, gravel, sand, chalky
marl, brick-earth, and chalk itself, are the
main component parts of this Pelion piled
upon Ossa. It is curious to observe the
different behaviour of the different ingredients
that have fallen from the cliff, during their
prostrate degradation on the beach. Large
fragments of stiff clay lie undissolved for days
and weeks, like lumps of half-sucked barley-sugar
undergoing the process of melting in a
giant's mouth. Peculiarly tough and
obstinate heaps will stand out, isolated on the
beach, for months, as gravestones to the
memory of the departed cliff, showing where
solid land once was. It seems a hard case.
Here is the substantial earth; there the
insidious parasitical sea, eating into its very
vitals! And is there no help for it? Where
the cliff is in great part composed of sandy
gravel, its destruction is there most rapid, as
between Bacton and Mundesley. Besides the
more massive slips, or "falls," as they are
termed, every fine and windy day causes the
sand to pour down in fluid streams, as