J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

Here Turner pictures aspects of ‘Beacon Hill’, a craggy summit on the Suffolk North Sea coast. Beacon Hill is mentioned in Samuel Lewis’ A Topographical Dictionary of England, under the entry for ‘Dunwich’. Lewis writes that during the reign of King Edward IV (1461–70) the mayor and bailiffs of Dunwich had jurisdiction over an area which extended ‘from the south pier of Southwold harbour to a point of land formerly called Beacon Hill, now Catliff’. 1 Neither Beacon Hill nor Catliff is recorded in any current map of Suffolk, though from Lewis’ account it could be reasonable to suggest that the rock was located somewhere between Southwold and Dunwich.