Dunwich on the Suffolk coast was once a major medieval port, the same physical size as the City of London in its late thirteenth-century heyday, with around ten thousand people and many churches. Two severe storms, in 1288 and 1328, began a long process of coastal erosion that carried the town's buildings off the cliff. The parish churches fell one by one as the sea gnawed at the soft cliffs. All Saints' church, the last parish church, toppled onto the beach in 1922, scattering graves into the surf. Today little of the old city is above water, and most of it lies in the shallows offshore. Its ruin drew generations of artists and writers, who found the vanishing town both eerie and moving. Dunwich shows how coastal erosion can erase an entire settlement over centuries.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.