page_title: Dornbusch (Hiddensee)
section_title: Coastal defence
hierarchical_section_title: Dornbusch (Hiddensee) / Coastal defence
caption_attribution_description: Original image description from the Deutsche Fotothek Strand auf Hiddensee
context_page_description: The Dornbusch is a region of low rolling hills in the northern part of the German Baltic Sea island of Hiddensee. It consists mainly of ice age depositions, that were left behind after the glacier thawed. It is one of three island cores of the Hiddensee responsible for the emergence of the lowland.
  The Dornbusch measures about 2.45 kilometres from north to south and about 2.85 kilometres from east to west. Its highest point, at 72 metres above sea level, is the Schluckswiekberg, on which the Dornbusch Lighthouse, the symbol of Hiddensee, stands.
  With much of its cliffed coast still active it represents an important landscape in the West Pomeranian Lagoon Area National Park and is part of protection zone II. Numerous footpaths run through its varied countryside.
context_section_description: Since 1899, several measurements of cliff recession have been made. Consistently, an annual loss of 20 centimetres per year was recorded between the lighthouse and the Swantiberg. On the Enddorn and before the construction of the wall at the Hucke, there was even a loss of 60 centimetres a year. The material eroded from the Dornbusch cliffs is transported by currents to the southeast and southwest and enables both the Hiddensee lowlands on Gellen and the Neubessin to continue to grow. Here a graded shoreline is forming. In probably several thousand years, the entire Dornbusch will have been removed.
  Along the cliff edge, large masses of glacial till are continually breaking off. From the clifftop path between Enddorn Swantiberg, the abrasion process has been observed clearly for several years. The last major collapses happened in 2000 and 2004 at the Totes Kerl.
  The only clearly conspicuous coastal defence structure is the 2-kilometre-long stone wall between Rennbaumhuk and Hartem Ort, which at the Hucke has been a height of 3 metres. From 1938 until the war broke out in 1939, the first section at the Hucke was built about 20 yards away from the beach, the narrow water channel between the stone wall and the shore was filled rapidly with sand. Later it was extended to the south. At the Hucke and the beach of Kloster the land had previously retreated very rapidly. The outcome is not purely positive however. The steep coast was indeed successfully protected, but there were still cliff collapses, due to weather conditions, that formed a large alluvial fan. That could not even be washed away in a storm flood because of the wall and it has gradually become overgrown with bushes. As a result, one of the most interesting sections of cliff on Hiddensee was not preserved.
  In 1937 nine steel sheet groynes were built at the Swantiberg near the lighthouse. They were in the ensuing decades severely damaged, however, and are now barely recognizable.
  The coastal defence woods afforested in 1861 with pine, oak, hornbeam and hazel on the western side of the Dornbusch protect the area from wind erosion.
caption: The beach of Kloster before the construction of the southern part of the coastal defence wall between 1950 and 1977 – looking south
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