The Bristol Channel drowns

The sea came up the Bristol Channel on a bright winter morning, went twenty miles inland in places, and drowned perhaps two thousand people.

Church walls from Somerset to south Wales still carry the marks, some of them nearly eight feet up. Whether it was a storm surge on a high tide or a tsunami is still argued; the contemporary pamphlets describe "mighty hilles of water" moving faster than a man could run, which is the sort of detail that keeps the argument going.