All who live along the coast from Start Point to Strete Gate have been struck by the incremental loss of the beaches in Start Bay

The big Slapton Memorial car park has shrunk by more than half and parts of the A379 have fallen into the sea.

Concrete revetments and massive boulders have been put in place and shingle moved from Strete Gate to Torcross with little or no impact on stopping the erosion.

The cause of the shingle movement is the natural process of longshore drift - currents move material from one end of a bay to the other but in the case of the beaches of Start Bay what is happening is far from natural.

It is the direct result of the massive shingle and sand dredging of the Skerries Bank at the turn of the last century and while many people know the story of Hallsands, few make the connection between the loss of the beach there and the unleashing of longshore drift on the rest of the coastline.

The beaches and Slapton Line were formed at the beginning of the Holocene approximately 11,700 years ago as the glaciers of the ice age melted depositing the material they had picked up as the ice flowed over what is now the seabed of the English Channel.

This formed both the beaches of the coast of Start Bay – notably Slapton Line – and as the glacier retreated further the Skerries Bank.

The Skerries and the beaches were thus two parts of a closed system – a ‘relict feature’ where any material removed could not naturally be replaced by material from coastal erosion.

The Skerries was particularly important not only because it contained huge reserves of the sand and gravel forming the beaches but also because it provided a natural breakwater in the bay off Start Point that diminished the power of the most destructive Atlantic storm waves.

Before dredging any huge storm was likely to have the effect of increasing the size of the beaches at Hallsands and round the bay by driving material from the Skerries inland.