Lines of Sight: When a Literary Landscape Comes to Life

The town of Dunwich, once a thriving medieval port on England's Suffolk Coast, has for centuries been crumbling into the sea. All that now remains of the old structures is a small collection of hilltop ruins, flanked by a nineteenth-century church and a handful of newer homes built far from the water's edge. Served by a single pub and a few guesthouses, the local economy has long catered principally to visitors, many of whom are part of a long line of artists and poets who have been drawn here since the Victorian age to contemplate the town's picturesque decay.

I originally learned of Dunwich through W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, a book that cast a strange spell over me when I first read it, eventually compelling me to travel halfway across the world to see its somber sites for myself. In it, the author describes how Dunwich's church towers and graveyards, well shafts and walled fortifications, were all washed away, stone by stone, by the storms and encroaching waters of the North Sea. "All of it has gone under," Sebald wrote, "and is now below the sea, beneath alluvial sand and gravel." The collapse of a community whose endurance must have always seemed certain to its residents, even as its impending disappearance became self-evident, is emblematic of Sebald's obsessions. But Dunwich is distinct from a prototypical ghost town—noteworthy not for the faded allure of its architecture, but for the near total absence of its own ruins. Its former splendor, now entirely intangible, is something to be imagined rather than seen.

In Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay's study of humankind's fixation on the vestiges of our own past, she plainly observes that "the pleasure felt by most of us in good ruins is great." She goes on to quote from Thomas Whately's eighteenth-century study of English gardens, asserting that "no circumstance so forcibly marks the desolation of a spot once inhabited, as the prevalence of nature over it." Since human settlement almost always represents dominion over the environment, there is perhaps some consolation to be had in a place like Dunwich, where nature has won out over humankind's will to subvert it. "If you look out from the cliff-top across the sea towards where the town must once have been," wrote Sebald, "you can sense the immense power of emptiness."

The morning after my arrival in Dunwich, I went for a walk along the cliffs. The sound of the waves that had seemed so distant from my guest room the night before was now crushingly loud, at odds with the tranquil water beyond the swells. This was, perhaps, exactly what I had come for: to stand where Sebald had stood and feel what he might have felt. With the waves roaring against the beach, it became difficult to think straight, as if thoughts themselves were being hollowed out and tossed aside. The sound, pregnant with destructive power and powerful enough to shake the body, was nevertheless the most natural thing in the world.

Leaving the cliffs behind, I walked along the edge of Dunwich Forest until it met the southern end of the Reedland and Dingle marshes, which stretched out toward the slate-colored horizon. Sebald had described these marshlands as a place of "grey water, mudflats, and emptiness," viewing them with the same sense of desolation he perceived all along the coast. But to someone accustomed to the arid vistas of the American Southwest, as I was, the panorama seemed vivid, filled with movement and life. Continuing across the sedge, I found a small corpse tucked into the wet grass—a red fox sprawled out like a future archaeological specimen, its eyes clenched and its fur still bright under the cloud-covered sun. The animal's flesh had begun to decompose in a few discrete places, with most of its hair still trembling in the cold gusts of wind. I crouched down for a closer look and hovered there for...