Memories of Dunwich

Dunwich Monastery Gateway

My earliest memory of Greyfriars in Dunwich was probably driving down the hill in my grandfather's old car in 1960 as he brought me to my new home at The Barne Arms Hotel. I had been at boarding school at Dollar in Scotland, and my grandfather had met me off the train in London and driven me along the tortuous roads (including the old A12) to Dunwich. Descending the hill, just before St James' Street opened out, the ruins on the right hand side seemed portentious, as I loved anything old and historic, and this was certainly both. Glimpses of the ruined buildings could be seen through the gate, and later I was to frequently circumnavigate the whole monastery, it's seaward wall being the final outer wall of the ancient city, and the gap between wall and clifftop getting shorter every year.
The first year I lived in Dunwich, there was I think, the last of the pilgrimages to the Monastery, with a religious procession led up the street, past the pub to the Monastery, led by churchmen, banners and numerous pilgrims. I don't know what happened after that, but it was the last one I saw, although I know that in the Church of England, there is still a Bishop of Dunwich. Dunwich was reputedly where St Felix landed to christianise the heathen Angles, who at that time populated Anglia. The other particular memories I have are of flashing past it at near ground level, and at breakneck speed on a 6-wheeled cart built from a salvaged pram and some pieces of wood, with our 'revolutionary' (we thought) new steering system. Justin North, my best friend from Marshside across the road from the pub and I, had built it outside his garage just off the Beach Lane, and would trundle it up to the top of the hill and take turns to career down. Nowadays it would be exceptionally foolish (it was too in those days) due to the amount of traffic, but we were young and foolhardy. At one time we converted it into an armoured car with large carboard box complete with turret on the back, to help us in our 'gang war' with other local boys. On one occasion, I was steering, Justin was in the back with his head emerging from the 'turret' when we had a mishap at the bottom. The steering came away in my hands and we careered into the garden wall outside The Ferns, the next house to Marshside. (The Ferns had once accommodated H Rider-Haggard, when he came to visit Suffolk, and more latterly it had been the summer holiday residence of Dr Roger Bannister of 1 Minute Mile fame). The result was a fair bit of damage to the cart and a number of minor cuts and bruises to our persons, Justin's head having ripped through the top and front of the (fairly substantial) cardboard box at the back.

The Rubble on the Beach

I spent my teenage years in Dunwich, and in retrospect they were wonderful. Freedom, long walks, the beach and sea, cliffs, marshes and the old tank defences from WWII. My best friend Justin North, who lived at 'Marshside' opposite me at The Ship, and I spent hours during those years, roaming, swimming, canoeing, making carts to career down the hill from the monastery, and resurrecting a storm damaged painter's punt washed ashore to row to Walberswick on the irrigation rivers behind the dunes. Although All Saints had fallen off the cliff long before we were born, some of the cemetery remained on the cliff top, including numerous unmarked pauper's graves. Pieces of masonry and rubble still lay at the foot of the cliff, now covered frequently by the tides and the pebbles, but occasionally washed clean for brief periods allowing us to scramble over them. Our most interesting times however were after the neap tides in the Spring when high seas would wash away more of the sandy cliffs, causing minor falls and the exposure of more graves. One one occasion I recall, we saw cut-away graves near the top of the cliff with several leg bones protruding, one above the other, clearly mass graves where a number of bodies had been buried in the same grave. The local vicar, appropriately named I recall, the Revd Lovegood or something similar, used to come along with a plastic sack and collect the skulls and bones thus revealed, and would reinter them in the graveyard in St James' the relatively modern church at the bottom of the main street (St James'). Justin was about to attend Art School and was very interested in photography (he is now a professional), and on one occasion we found a complete skull embedded in a lump of sandy cliff that had slid down from the graveyard. We liberated it, and Justin took it home, cleaned it, and photographed it in various lights, including I recall, having a candle lit inside. I can't remember what eventually happened to it, but if anyone digs the garden at Marshside and finds human remains, that's probably the where they originated from.

The Ghost at The Ship

My parents owned and ran The Ship Inn from 1960 to 1975. My father a retired soldier and wartime paratrooper had taken early retirement to buy the business, then called The Barne Arms Hotel after the estate. The new Inn sign was based on the Blue Peter logo from the BBC Children's programme (from whom he'd got permission to use a similar but not identical design). As boys, my brother and I shared an attic room. Shortly after I had left to go to the Army in about 1969/70 my brother had experienced a ghost in the attic room. Waking, he'd found what he described as a woman sitting beside his bed, grey in colour. As he woke, she'd risen, turned and seemed to walk through the wall beside him. Of course no-one believed him. Years later, in about 1998, my wife and I stayed with the owner, Annie Marshlain, at The Ship. She'd been a friend of my parents, having come over several years with friends to work there in her summer holidays, and had eventually bought it a few years after my father's death in 1975. She gave us a guided tour, and I was astounded to find that another room now opened up off the old attic bedroom. Annie explained that it had been noticed that there was an extra dormer window on the roof adjacent to our attic bedroom window, and so they had looked behind the plaster of the wall in the room, to find a sealed-off door. Behind was an empty but fully functional, floor-boarded room. It transpired, all this time later that the woman my brother had seen 20 years earlier had actually walked through the now exposed doorway, that none of us had had any idea existed. The pub, dating back to Tudor times and once a smuggling pub with secret passages in the concealed cellar was full of history and intrigue, so it's anyone's guess what must have happened there once, and why the room was so thoroughly concealed.