Abstract
F or the last nine years the sea has been encroaching on the land near Westward Ho ! at the rate of about 30 feet a year. This encroachment only affects about a mile of the coast-line, but it is of special interest both on account of the formations which it exposes and the rapidity with which the sea has eaten into a district which had hitherto been apparently but little injured by it. I have not been able to obtain any correct map of the district older than the parish map of Northam, and that does not give the actual limits of high tide with any accuracy, so that it is impossible to say how much further the land may have extended seaward when Westward Ho! was still unnamed and almost uninhabited. A very old inhabitant, however, told me that the grass used to extend for several yards beyond the old road leading from the ladies’ baths to the Burrows, which was still in existence in 1875, when I first went to Westward Ho! The accompanying map is reduced from one constructed from an actual survey that I made in 1879, but the line of the top of the former ridge in 1875 was sketched in from memory, aided by the parish map. The district which is principally affected by the encroachment is a large sandy common called the Northam Burrows. This common is the southern part of the delta of the united rivers Taw and Torridge, and the inland part
Published Version
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