Radio Times: Review by:; Chris Gardner

It’s hard to imagine that the tiny Suffolk village of Dunwich was once a thriving medieval port. Much of it was engulfed by a great storm in 1286 but legend has it that the church bells still ring out underwater at certain tides, a legend that inspired Kevin Crossley-Holland’s short story Sea Tongue. Here, extracts from this work, read by the people he meets, help to illustrate his elegiac thought-provoking quest to observe the effects of coastal erosion in East Anglia, beginning in Norfolk at Happisburgh’s 15th-century church. In 50 years’ time it may well have fallen prey to the implacable, gnawing power of the North Sea. Crossley-Holland also meets a self-styled King Canute striving to save the crumbling cliffs at Hunstanton and hears memories of the devastating 1953 floods in which 30 people perished in eastern England alone.

About this programme

Norfolk-based writer and poet Kevin Crossley-Holland meets East Anglians directly affected by coastal erosion, including storyteller Hugh Lupton, the Bishop of Dunwich, and the bellringers and residents of the Norfolk village of Happisburgh. They bring alive Kevin's short story Sea Tongue, about the myth of the drowned bells of Dunwich.