Seaward Lane is 2.4 kilometres long and ends at a cliff. It used to end at a farm. The farm went in a storm nine winters ago, and the edge has moved inland by about a metre every year since.

The county's engineers have a date for the day the road becomes unsafe to maintain. They have told the eleven families at the far end what it is. The families have not left.

The survey

Each spring a surveyor walks the lane with a staff and a notebook and measures from the last telegraph pole to the drop. This year the distance was 38 metres. It was 47 when he started.

"People ask me to be wrong," he said. "I would like to be. The sea is very consistent."

The county's plan is to stop repairing the last four hundred metres when the edge reaches the pole.

Why they stay

The houses cannot be sold and cannot be insured. That is one reason. The other is harder to put in a report.

One couple have lived in the end house for forty-one years. Their garden is a third of the size it was. They have moved the shed twice and the armchair they sit in to watch the evening once a year, further back each time.

What the county offers

• A grant toward moving costs, capped at a fixed sum per household
• First refusal on new plots two kilometres inland
• No compensation for the houses themselves

Seven families have refused. Four are thinking about it.

The road will not be closed with a gate, the engineers say. It will simply stop being a road. The post still arrives every morning, for now.