By Alan Tutt, Visitor Services Assistant
‘The Buried City of Shipden & the New Town of Cromer’
“Due north, and twenty-one miles as the crow flies from the Castle Hill in Norwich, stands, huddled into a hollow and along the cliff edge, the little village of Cromer, and a quarter of a mile out to sea the tide rolls in and rolls out over the lost town of Shipden”
These are the title and opening lines of the first chapter of ‘Cromer Past and Present’, penned by Walter Rye and published in 1889 in aid of the church restoration fund. It remains a very useful guide and history of the early days of the town – thought hard to find to purchase nowadays. Walter practiced as a solicitor in London from 1866 to 1900, when he upped sticks and came to Norwich – indeed he was Mayor of the city in 1908. He liked to trace his ancestry back to the old Rye family of Cromer.
Walter goes on to mention that once or twice a year at the ‘lowest neap tides’ there are just about visible above the sand, the ridges of old walls and a ‘great squared flint work’ known locally as Church Rock which he believes to be the former tower of Shipden Church. He does, however, add a note of caution, that others believe the submerged church to be half a mile more to the west. Of the precise location of Shipden Church, more later.
In medieval times, the settlement of Cromer was divided into Shipden juxta Felbrigg , the town of Cromer itself – (Felbrigg being a small village just south of Cromer, most notable for Felbrigg Hall, an 18th century Jacobean mansion); and Shipden juxta Mere, literally ‘next to the sea’ – each having its own church. Christopher Pipe, in his seminal ‘A Dictionary of Cromer & Overstrand History’ argues the name of Shipden, in medieval documents, ‘implies’ the name means ‘sheep valley’.
The first mention of Shipden in written records occurs in the Domesday book, the manuscript record of the “Great Survey” of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of William the Conqueror. It recorded that the town was a flourishing fishing community with 117 villagers, meadows and woodland, as well as a church, St Peter’s, manor house and harbour. As late as 1235, King Edward I granted a Friday market, and a yearly feast of eight days to Shipden – which sounds great fun!
Yet the name, Cromer, does not appear until 1262 in the will of Sir John de Repps and in conjunction with Shipden in the ‘Hundred Rolls’ of 1274. Interestingly, in 1337 King Edward III gave permission for the building of a new church on the site of the one at Shipden juxta Felbrigg and granted an additional acre of land. Just prior to that, in 1336, part of Shipden’s graveyard fell into the sea, with the church following by 1400. By the 14th Century much of Shipden had been lost to the sea’s ceaseless activity.
Most of the townsfolk moved further inland to Cromer, where it became a popular area to settle down in because of a stream which flowed roughly northwards, creating a cutting – now The Gangway – and providing easy access to the sea. The loss of homes and livelihood was surely a tragedy for the villagers, forced to watch their previous lives vanish into Davy Jones’ locker.
It was, however, convenient for opportunistic, poor and desperate men; it is said that they would sleep on the shore, waiting until low tide when they could dive down and pillage anything worth taking from old Shipden.
Fast forward to the 1800s and the church tower of Shipden is said to be sometimes still visible during low tides. The church steeple stood near 20 feet high above the seabed, making it a prominent feature of the coast, and nicknamed ‘Church Rock’.
By this time Cromer had become popular with the Victorians as a great place to escape the bustle and smoke of the city and to enjoy the seaside; the salt sea air giving invigoration; swimming and walking good for the constitution.
A paddle steamer would take the holiday makers from Great Yarmouth to Cromer Pier. It was anchored offshore and rowing boats would ferry the passengers to and from the beach. One day did not go according to plan for the trippers.
On August 8th, 1888, the paddle-steamer, ‘SS Victoria’, carrying approximately 100 passengers, ran aground on Church Rock. Ropes were attached to the boat to try and haul it off into safer waters. The boat, however, was firmly wedged in place. During the next few days local fishermen did a roaring trade taking rubber-neckers out to see the wreck but this business was cut short by Trinity House deciding it was a danger that needed removing.
The steamer was a write-off and from that point on Church Rock was regarded as a dangerous nuisance; a hazard to shipping. The decision was made to blow up the church with dynamite. It too was devoured by the deep as had Shipden before it.
Now nothing is visible of this lost ‘Atlantis’of Shipden and there is no sign of any evidence that it ever existed when you look out from the shoreline. The former curator of Cromer Museum, Martin Warren, with David Pope (local diver & then member of the Inshore Lifeboat crew), took a dive down to the ruins on 21st September 1986. David had trained Martin up to do the dive and did a dummy run in the pool belonging to Cromer Country Club. Alan Keyworth provided the boat to use as the diving tender and to assist. The spot for Church Rock can be seen in the accompanying diagram, devised by Martin.
Their boat took them out a quarter of a mile north of the Bath House on the Esplanade and north-east from the end of the pier. The descent was twenty-three feet down into the water, so dark that any surviving walls were barely visible. Three substantial pieces of masonry were located and inspected before David ran out of air. They were large rounded beach flints set into mortar.
After the dive Martin concluded ‘these findings verify the legend of Church Rock at least being the remains of a building made of large flints.’ He added that the building on the chalk seabed would have lain on the beach after its foundations had been undermined by the sea, before later settling into deeper water; and that similar could be seen at that time on Sidestrand beach, being the remains of cottages once in Tower Lane that fell in the 1960s and ‘70s.
The buildings that the villagers once lived in are now the perfect habitat for crabs and lobsters that have taken up residency in the old ruins. Martin saw the floor was lined with flint and chalk and littered with broken pieces of the old steamer. He brought a few items back with him to the surface, including a stone tracery bar from a window and a large stone brick from the church. These are currently on display in a case at Cromer Museum.
These remains would have lain at the foot of the Cromer cliffs from about 1400 to 1450. Erosion continued until the seawall was erected in 1846; this works out at an erosion rate of about a yard a year, which fits with the location of the dive at Church Rock.
Percy Trett in his Eastern Daily Press newspaper column, ‘In the Countryside’ reported that he took ‘a team of divers’ to take a look, stating “the conditions were idyllic, rather like the Mediterranean (!) and we had 30 foot visibility underwater…when we found the ruin it still had some of the wreckage of the Victoria around it, this we retrieved and placed in the Maritime Museum for safe keeping’.
He continued, “the substantial remains of the flint walls were a colourful mass of sea anemones and soft coral, appropriately known as dead-men’s fingers, also living there were hundreds of small Cromer crabs. As I gazed at this underwater garden, I thought of the people who walked and worshipped there.”
This is not the end of the story of Shipden or Church Rock, for it has now become the stuff of legend and superstition. It is said that on dark, stormy nights when the sea looks like black ink and the waves are so high you can feel spray from the cliffs edge, you can still hear the sound of the church bells ringing out across the vast North Sea.
believed to lie
A poem about Shipden The Raggedy Men of Cromer Pier by Lynn Woollacott can be found on this website: placesofpoetry.org.uk
Other Lost Settlements
There are believed to be around 200 lost settlements in Norfolk. This includes places which have been abandoned as settlements due to a range of reasons and at different dates. Types of lost settlement include deserted medieval villages, relocated or “shrunken” villages, and those lost to coastal erosion as Shipden was. Other similar examples from farther down the coast are the city of Dunwich in Suffolk and Newton of Yarmouth. Most of Eccles-on-Sea, a thriving community of 2,000 acres when it appeared in the Domesday Book, is now Eccles-under-Sea.
Three violent storms in 1570 wiped out swathes of the Eccles village houses and left the church in a poor state of disrepair leading to it being largely dismantled. The tower, however, was left standing, a useful aid to navigation for passing mariners. In 1605, villagers in Eccles gave a petition to Norwich Quarter Sessions for a reduction in their taxes, arguing that advancing seas had swallowed up 1,000 acres of their land and leaving just fourteen houses and the ruined church.
Then very high tides on Boxing Day 1862 etched into the sandhills and left the tower exposed, once again, like a St Stephen’s Day gift for the villagers of Eccles. From then on it was sometimes partially covered by drifts of sand, other times laid bare by the ceaseless tides. Families sought it out for picnics and artists for a subject to paint or draw. It became known, affectionately, as ‘The Lonely Sentinel’ and as such, a fashionable place to visit.
In ‘Norfolk Life’, by Lilias Rider Haggard (youngest daughter of the author of ‘King Solomon’s Mines’) , based on columns she wrote for the EDP, she recalls the eerie sight of the stranded church tower and the frightful sight of sea-bleached skeletons exposed in the sandy graveyard. She wrote: “One September day years ago, when the tower of Eccles Church still stood on the dunes, there came a north-easterly gale and a ‘scour’ which swept the sand from the old graveyard, leaving the long outlines of the graves washed clean by the sea. In one lay an almost perfect skeleton embedded in the clay, the hollow-eyed skull gazing up at the limitless sweep of the sky.”
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