If you want to see the dramatic effects of coastal erosion on our Suffolk coastline then take a trip from Woodbridge, past Sutton Hoo to East Lane, Bawdsey.

A dramatic and exciting piece of coastline, the area is stark at the best of times with its litter of wartime pill boxes, gun emplacements and a Martello tower (one of more than a dozen on the coastline running south from Suffolk to Kent, built to defend England against the Napoleonic invaders). Since September enormous diggers have been working 7 days a week to shift a mountain of enormous Norwegian granite boulders to shore up the crumbling cliff.

The cliffs have eroded dramatically over the past decade – so damaging are the highest tides that up to 20-metres of coastline has been lost in a single storm. If the erosion was to continue at its current rate it would eventually engulf the nearby low-lying farmland and homes around Bawdsey, Hollesley and Alderton.

East Lane was low on the list of priorities as far as national funding was concerned, so a local community partnership was set up to raise the funds to safeguard the Martello Tower which now stands on the very brink of the cliff and the area around it.

Locally-owned farmland has been donated free to a specially formed Trust which will then sell it off to developers for housing.

The East Lane Trust at Bawdsey on the Suffolk coast needs to raise £2.2m in order to fund the repair work, but once complete the sea defences will help protect farms and isolated private homes as well as controlling the movement of the volatile shingle coast between Aldeburgh and Felixstowe. If the sea flooded in, waves would extend inland, threatening lives as far inland as Hollesley and northwards towards the river Ore, sweeping away Shingle Street within 20 years and even threatening Aldeburgh by causing the erosion of the long shingle spit at Orford Ness.