Miriam Margolyes, who owns a house in St Margaret’s Bay, has written directly to the DHB to plead for the board to stop this “dangerous enterprise”.

She said:

I own a house on the cliff top at St Margaret’s Bay and we already have to face terrifying cliff erosion.

It seems you have no sense of what damage your project will cause to local people and to the environment.

I would like to place on record my profound disgust at this brutal application and urge you to drop the whole idea.

I’ve always believed in the harbour board until now and have defended the docks and the people who try to earn their living here in the depressed South East, but this is a dangerous and appalling project, which will threaten the whole coastline.

You have become destroyers of what makes this area so wonderful.

She said her objections were based on the sea life that could be destroyed or negatively affected, including 350 grey seals that would be disturbed by the noise and vibration and the impact on their food source.

She claims lowering the seabed could cause coastal erosion and leave sea defences less effective.

Ms Margolyes also said that the buried wrecks of the Admiral Gardner and possibly a German U12 submarine and the remains of Battle of Britain planes and pilots could be disturbed and desecrated.

Extract from http://www.kentonline.co.uk/deal/news/goodwin-sands-campaign-gains-momentum-98945/ 14th July 2016.

Deborah Moggach has appealed to the Marine Management Organisation, which is reviewing the application to dredge.

Myself and my family would like to make the strongest possible objection to this application, to dredge from this very fragile and special ecosystem. There is nowhere like the Goodwin Sands, and to disturb it would do huge damage to the wildlife there – the colony of seals, the spawning fish and the marine life in general.

This site has been recommended by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as a Marine Conservation Zone and must be protected for future generations.

Dredging on such a scale would further add to the erosion along the coast, by altering the sea currents. The knock-on effects could be calamitous.

Please, please turn down this application. This wild, unique and magical place would be ruined.

Extract from http://www.kentonline.co.uk/deal/news/goodwin-sands-campaign-gains-momentum-98945/ 14th July 2016.

The Goodwin Sands are one of the last true wildernesses of Britain – and by extension, of Europe.  They are loved as much for what they represent as for the physical place they are. I was raised opposite them. When night fishing for codling from Deal’s shingle foreshore I often heard the roar of the rising tides across the distant Goodwins. Walking the chalk cliff path to Dover and back I could sometimes see them out there in the Channel, all greys and yellows ringed with white water.  I knew some of the fishermen who worked the rich waters around them; men whose other job was often to serve in the Walmer Lifeboat to save the live sailors marooned on them. When I left Deal and began travelling to research and write I headed mainly north: to the Lakes, Northumberland, the Western Isles, Norway and Iceland. I never saw, nor heard of, a place quite like the Goodwin Sands. Not once.

So if they’re more than a place what is it they ‘represent’? For one thing, they are somewhere humans cannot stand for longer than it takes for the tide to come in. That’s a very humbling thing for a species that has destroyed so much: it’s a reminder of our impermanence. For another they are a still-living history that connects us to a past and present too easily forgotten, which we should always protect.  No greater evidence of that forgetting, that losing touch with what we daily need, is the idea that we can treat them as a physical resource. The economic arguments for such despoliation, based as they always are on flawed and partial research, are by definition specious and absurd. We do not any more cut down ancient oaks because the wood is useful; nor do we willingly despoil mountains and moorland, wetlands and heath.  We let them be, we cherish them, we honour them.

By simply being what they are day-by-day, tide-by-tide, the Goodwin Sands remind us that one of the greatest arts of being civilized is leaving well alone.

Campaigns like ours must always be fought and fought hard.  My mother was one of those who fought the planners in the 1950’s who wanted to demolish the ‘slums’ of North Deal and replace them with ‘improved’ housing. She and her fellow campaigners won that fight – and the so-called slums became the Conservation Area it now is, to be enjoyed for generations to come. We must win our fight for the Goodwins, a place we need never visit to measure its value.  It is here already, in our hearts and minds and spirits and it is immeasurable. In respecting such wilderness we respect ourselves.

William Horwood, author, November 2017

Sands of Time

Regarded with awe, apprehension and yet reverence by seafarers over centuries, the Goodwin Sands constitute a rich mixture of maritime history, natural science and marine ecology as well as being a graveyard for so many brave, and for the most part, unsuspecting seafarers. Thousands of merchant and naval sailors of differing nationalities are buried there along with the remains of the wooden, iron and steel ships which remaining undisturbed, mark their graves.

Today the Goodwin Sands are a breeding and feeding ground for so many species of fish, crustaceans and seals to the extent that – if ever there was one – this is surely the definition of a Marine Conservation Zone. Put another way, it would be sacrilege if the Goodwin Sands were to slip the MCZ net.

The Goodwin Sands SOS team have done an excellent job in highlighting the need for conservation of an area of the English Channel that has remained untouched for centuries. There can be no commercial justification in seeing this area desecrated. At high water the Goodwin Sands disappear from view but we must not allow our maritime history and ecological future to disappear from our consciousness in a similar way!

Dr Bill Moses, MBE, MA – July 2018