Dunwich

Coordinates: 52°16′37″N 1°37′36″E / 52.27688°N 1.62672°E / 52.27688; 1.62672

Dunwich /ˈdʌnᵻtʃ/ is a village and civil parish in Suffolk, England. It is located in the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB around 92 miles (148 km) north-east of London, 9 miles (14 km) south of Southwold and 7 miles (11 km) north of Leiston, on the North Sea coast.

In the Anglo-Saxon period, Dunwich was the capital of Kingdom of the East Angles but the harbour and most of the town have since disappeared due to coastal erosion. At its height it was an international port similar in size to 14th-century London. Its decline began in 1286 when a storm surge hit the East Anglian coast followed by a great storm in 1287 and another great storm also in 1287, and it was eventually reduced in size to the village it is today. Dunwich is possibly connected with the lost Anglo-Saxon placename Dommoc.

The population of the civil parish at the 2001 census was 84, which increased to 183 according to the 2011 Census, however the area used by the Office of National Statistics for 2011 also includes part of the civil parish of Westleton. There is no parish council, instead there is a parish meeting.

Dunwich (Lovecraft)

Dunwich (/ˈdʌnwɪtʃ/) is a fictional town that appeared in the H. P. Lovecraft short story "The Dunwich Horror" (1929). Dunwich is found in the fictional Miskatonic River Valley of Massachusetts, part of the imaginary region sometimes called Lovecraft Country. The inhabitants are depicted as inbred, uneducated, and very superstitious, while the town itself is described as economically poor with many decrepit and abandoned buildings.

Origin

Lovecraft may have named the town after the lost port of Dunwich in Suffolk, England. This town was the subject (though not mentioned by name) of Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "By the North Sea", which was in an anthology owned by Lovecraft. This Dunwich also appears in Arthur Machen's novella The Terror (1917), which Lovecraft is known to have read.

Lovecraft also could have been inspired by other New England towns with names ending in -wich, such as Ipswich near Salem, Massachusetts, East and West Greenwich in Rhode Island, and Greenwich, Massachusetts, a rural town that has since been flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir. Although the English town is pronounced "DUN-ich" (similar to the Rhode Island Greenwiches), Lovecraft never specified how he preferred his Dunwich be pronounced.

Dunwich (disambiguation)

Dunwich is a small town in Suffolk, England. Dunwich may also refer to:

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