Covehithe beach, Suffolk, where the cliffs crumble like cake

The most eroded beach in Britain has a post-apocalyptic feel.

Collapsing cliffs and dead trees on beach, Covehithe
Collapsing cliffs and dead trees on the beach
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)
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Undoubtedly beautiful, Covehithe is sometimes called ‘the beach at the end of the world’ and it does have a post-apocalyptic feel to it.

Backed by sandstone cliffs that crumble like cake, no other place in Britain suffers such a high rate of coastal erosion; the North Sea has encroached here by some 1,640ft since 1830 (about five football pitches) and there’s even a little lane, running from South Cove past the medieval ruins of St Andrew’s Church, which stops abruptly at the cliff edge.

Weathered tree stump at Covehithe beach on the Suffolk coast

Strange and evocative dead trees that once grew on the clifftop protrude from the sands, salt-blasted, together with the remains of a wartime pillbox that crashed down some years ago.

On the far side of the cliff is Benacre Broad, a lagoon where bearded reedlings, water rails and little terns impassively watch the waves’ approach.

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Annunciata Elwes
Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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