Landslips on the UK Coast

[Pauline]

There are 11,000 miles of coast in Britain (not including Northern Ireland) and parts of it are falling into the sea. Since no one lives more than 70 miles from the coast, this affects all of us living here. I live in West Dorset on the South West coast. Every year we have small rockslides from our famous cliffs at West Bay (featured in the TV series Broadchurch). I live a mile and a half inland from these cliffs. Most of these slides happen and no one is involved, but a few years ago someone was killed by a rockslide while walking on the beach near Hive Beach.

The South West Coast Path (official long distance trail) goes along the cliffs, starting in Minehead, Somerset, through North Devon, all of Cornwall, South Devon, and Dorset, ending at Poole. The trail is rerouted in places because of landslips.

The cliffs in our area are filled with fossils and when there is a new rockslide people come out to go through it looking for them. This can be dangerous because the rockslide is not stable and people have to be rescued if they sink into the dirt/mud.

On Thursday morning we had a huge rockslide, bigger than any I have seen here. Not as big as some of the very old ones that you can see (these might be thousands of years old), but big. We had a dry winter and spring, then a lot of rain this week. A few days earlier there was a small rockslide in this same place.

East Cliff and the rockslide the day after it happened​

Looking at East Cliff from the pier
​

On top of the cliffs is a 20 foot wide strip with the coast path, then a fence and a golf course. After the slide, the fence is hanging in air. No more coast path here. This is a spot we regularly walk. Now we have to use an alternate trail on the other side of the golf course.

We have some Brits on the forums and some people who travel here. Does anyone have information about landslips/rockslides/cliff erosion in their area?

 

[Ian Sutton]

Hi Pauline
Not much beyond your overview.

Some friends live on the North Norfolk coast and there are varying degrees of erosion, with fossil-hunters out in force when they know there has been a fall.

Every once in a while there is a TV piece about people forced to move out of their houses as the erosion creeps up their back garden towards the house. Heart-breaking for them of course. We did have one fairly recent controversial attempt to 'turn back the tide' by dumping loads of concrete - which rather ruins the joys of having coastal views!

regards
Ian

 

[Eleanor]

I remember watching pictures on the television of when the Holbeck Hall Hotel built high above the cliff in Scarborough gently slid into the sea. It doesn't seem possible that was 1993.

The section of coastline further south is also subject to frequent cliff falls. There are some splendid (or perhaps not so splendid) pictures here.

The map givs some idea of the number of communities that have been lost to coastal erosion.