Crosses tell the story of Goodwin Sands | Letters

Letters: Dr Diana Hirst reminds us that a huge graveyard lies in this sandbank. Plus a letter from Paul Tothill on the crown estate’s ownership of Britain’s seabeds

Re your report (‘Running riot through graves’: King Charles urged to protect Goodwin Sands from dredging, 18 August), in 1847 the German poet and novelist Theodor Fontane wrote the poem Goodwin-Sand, whose last lines translate as: “Mast-spikes stick up here and there / And where they surface in the gloom / They are crosses over the tomb. / This is a churchyard, half sea, half land, / These are the shoals of the Goodwin Sands.”

When I was a child at least two of those crosses still existed on the Sands. Now that they are gone, we need reminding that a huge graveyard with countless bodies from more than 2,000 wrecks lies a few miles off the coast at Deal.
Dr Diana Hirst
Rye, East Sussex

• Apart from being unimpressed by the crown estate’s pettifogging statement, I was astonished to find that the estate owns virtually all our seabeds, to a distance of 12 nautical miles, not to mention managing the rights for the UK’s continental shelf. It’s high time King Charles took a little direct action.
Paul Tothill
London

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