The Norfolk coast is slowly losing ground due to rising sea levels, and the government has given up its fight to save some villages, writes the Luxembourg Times. When Nicola Bayless’s parents bought a house in Happisburgh, an idyllic village on the Norfolk coast, they were told it would be 150 years before the erosion of the nearby cliff threatened it. “We will all have you dead long ago!” they said. But look, it’s not like that, says Bayless.

It was 23 years ago. Today, the Bayless house stands on the penultimate lot on the road; its front windows overlook an empty lot that used to be a neighbor’s house. Just behind the site is a cliff that Bayless says has receded eight meters in the past 18 months.

The erosion happened so quickly that Google Street View still shows houses that are no longer there.

“It has changed incredibly. You just don’t recognize the place,” said Bayless, 47, a nurse and Zumba instructor. “The houses, the friends who lived in those houses, are gone. Everything is lost.”

On the east coast of England, local residents have waged an unwinnable battle with the sea for generations. It is estimated that 250 meters of land was lost to erosion between 1600 and 1850. Local residents are used to storms, landslides, and sometimes floods – a flood in 1953 killed 76 people. But in recent decades things have changed faster than residents expected, and scientists are trying to understand how global warming could worsen the destruction.

Losing a place you call home to an inexorable process is a unique pain, but in Happisburgh, that pain is compounded by centuries of history.

Remains dating back almost a million years were discovered in the village. Axes, flints and other tools dating back 950,000 years have been discovered on its beach, including footprints dating back 800,000 years, the oldest found in Europe. Like everything else, they were washed away, but not before archaeologists were able to remove the casts.

Happisburgh is also a tourist attraction with a 14th century church, a beautiful stretch of coastline and a lighthouse built in 1790 – the oldest operating lighthouse in the region.

Established in 1540, local pub The Hill House was once frequented by Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle.

The coast is made up of sand, clay and silt – not strong enough to withstand the North Sea’s heavy rains and higher tides. Maps released by North Norfolk County Council show that a large part of the village is at risk of disappearing by 2055.

Other means of protection – for example, sloping wooden structures to protect the beach; or groin to hold the drifting sediment – will cost many millions. Ironically, the rock’s archaeological value has also earned it a special designation, a “Site of Special Scientific Interest,” which means the ground must erode to allow new discoveries to emerge.

There will probably be evacuation and resettlement of people.

Britain’s Climate Change Panel, the government’s advisory body, has found many coastal communities such as Happisburgh to be “unsustainable”. Last year, a report revealed that almost 200,000 properties across England are in places where it is too expensive or technically impossible to protect them.