On 26 January 2016 around 400 people gathered in the church of St Michael and All Angels, in the tiny village of Stokenham on England's South Devon coast, to mark the centenary of a disaster. 

In 1896, a government contract was awarded to Sir John Jackson Ltd to dredge shingle from the coast of nearby Start Bay to feed concrete for a Plymouth dockyard. The human and environmental consequences were elbowed aside in favour of lucrative progress—much to the alarm of the village of Hallsands, off which the dredging was taking place. Home to some 150 residents in 37 houses and a pub, by 1900 the fishing village had already seen the level of its beach