The town of Wisbeach is very like the town of Boston. It stands upon a
river which is very narrow and which curves, and in which there rises
and falls a most considerable tide, and which is bounded by slimy wooden
sides. Here, as at Boston, the boats cannot turn round; if they come in
frontways they have to go out backwards, like Mevagissey bees: an
awkward harbour.
As I sat there in the White Hart, waiting for steak and onions, I read
in a book descriptive of the place that a whale had come to Wisbeach
once, and I considered that a whale coming up to Wisbeach on a tide
would certainly stay there; not indeed for the delights of the town (of
which I say nothing), but because there would be no room to turn round;
and a whale cannot swim backwards. The only fish that can swim backwards
is an eel. This I have proved by observation, and I challenge any
fisherman to deny it.
So much for Wisbeach, which stands upon the River Nene or Nen, which is
the last of the towns defended by the old sea-wall--which is the third
of the Fen ports--the other two being Boston and Lynn, which is served
by two lines of railway and which has two stations.
Very early next morning, and by one of these stations, another man and I
took train to a bridge called Sutton Bridge, where one can cross the
River Nen, and where (according to the map) one can see both the
sea-walls, the old and the new. It was my plan to walk along the shore
of the Wash right across the flats to Lynn, and so at last perhaps
comprehend the nature of this curious land.
* * * * *
When I got to Sutton Bridge I discovered it to be a monstrous thing of
iron standing poised upon a huge pivot in mid-stream. It bore the
railway and the road together. It was that kind of triumphant
engineering which once you saw only in England, but which now you will
see all over the world. It was designed to swing open on its central
pivot to let boats go up the River Nen, and then to come back exactly to
its place with a clang; but when we got to it we found it neither one
thing nor the other. It was twisted just so much that the two parts of
the roads (the road on the bridge and the road on land) did not join.
Was a boat about to pass? No. Why was it open thus? A man was cleaning
it. The bridge is not as big as the Tower Bridge, but it is very big,
and the man was cleaning it with a little rag. He was cleaning the under
part, the mechanisms and contraptions that can only be got at when the
bridge is thus ajar. He cleaned without haste and without exertion, and
as I watched him I considered the mightiness of the works of Man
contrasted with His Puny Frame. I also asked him when I should pass, but
he answered nothing.
As we thus waited men gathered upon either side--men of all characters
and kinds, men holding bicycles, men in carts, afoot, on horseback,
vigorous men and feeble, old men, women also and little children, and
youths witless of life, and innocent young girls; they gathered and
increased, they became as numerous as leaves, they stretched out their
hands in a desire for the further shore: but the river ran between.
Then, as being next the gate, I again called out: When might we pass? A
Fenland man who was on duty there doing nothing said, I could pass when
the bridge was shut again. I said: When would that be? He said: Could I
not see that the man was cleaning the bridge? I said that, contrasting
the bridge with him and his little rag, he might go on from now to the
Disestablishment of the English Church before he had done; but as for
me, I desired to cross, and so did all that multitude.
Without grace they shut the bridge for us, the gate opened of itself,
and in a great clamorous flood, like an army released from a siege, we
poured over, all of us, rejoicing into Wringland; for so is called this
flat, reclaimed land, which stands isolated between the Nen and the
Ouse.
* * * * *
Was I not right in saying when I wrote about Ely that the corner of a
corner of England is infinite, and can never be exhausted?
Along the cut which takes the Nen out to sea, then across some level
fields, and jumping a ditch or two, one gets to the straight, steep, and
high dyke which protects the dry land and cuts off the plough from the
sea marshes. When I had climbed it and looked out over endless flats to
the sails under the brune of the horizon I understood the Fens.
* * * * *
Nowhere that I have been to in the world does the land fade into the sea
so inconspicuously.
The coasts of western England are like the death of a western man in
battle--violent and heroic. The land dares all, and plunges into a noisy
sea. This coast of Eastern England is like the death of one of these
eastern merchants here--lethargic, ill-contented, drugged with ease. The
dry land slips, and wallows into a quiet, very shallow water, confused
with a yellow thickness and brackish with the weight of inland water
behind.
I have heard of the great lakes, especially of the marshes at the mouth
of the Volga, in the Caspian, where the two elements are for miles
indistinguishable, and where no one can speak of a shore; but here the
thing is more marvellous, because it is the true sea. You have, I say,
the true sea, with great tides, and bearing ships, and seaports to which
the ships can go; and on the other side you have, inhabited, an ancient
land. There should be a demarcation between them, a tide mark or limit.
There is nothing. You cannot say where one begins and the other ends.
One does not understand the Fens until one has seen that shore.
The sand and the mud commingle. The mud takes on little tufts of salt
grass barely growing under the harsh wind. The marsh is cut and wasted
into little islands covered at every high tide, except, perhaps, the
extreme of the neaps. Down on that level, out from the dyke to the
uncertain line of the water, you cannot walk a hundred yards without
having to cross a channel more or less deep, a channel which the working
of the muddy tides has scoured up into the silt and ooze of the sodden
land. These channels are yards deep in slime, and they ramify like the
twisted shoots of an old vine. Were you to make a map of them as they
engrave this desolate waste it would look like the fine tortuous cracks
that show upon antique enamel, or the wandering of threads blown at
random on a woman's work-table by the wind.
There are miles and miles of it right up to the EMBANKMENT, the great
and old SEA-WALL, which protects the houses of men. You have but to
eliminate that embankment to imagine what the whole countryside must
have been like before it was raised, and the meaning of the Fens becomes
clear to you. The Fens were long ago but the continuation inland of this
sea-morass. The tide channels of the marsh were all of one kind, though
they differed so much in size. Some of these channels were small without
name; some a little larger, and these had a local name; others were a
little larger again, and worthy to be called rivers--the Ouse, the Nen,
the Welland, the Glen, the Witham. But, large or small, they were
nothing, all of them, but the scouring of tide-channels in the light and
sodden slime. It was the high tide that drowned all this land, the low
tide that drained it; and wherever a patch could be found just above the
influence of the tide or near enough to some main channel for the rush
and swirl of the water to drain the island, there the villages grew.
Wherever such a patch could be found men built their first homes.
Sometimes, before men civic, came the holy hermits. But man, religious,
or greedy, or just wandering, crept in after each inundation and began
to tame the water and spread out even here his slow, interminable
conquest. So Wisbeach, so March, so Boston grew, and so--the oldest of
them all--the Isle of Ely.
The nature of the country (a nature at which I had but guessed whenever
before this I had wandered through it, and which I had puzzled at as I
viewed its mere history) was quite clear, now that I stood upon the wall
that fenced it in from the salt water. It was easy to see not only what
judgments had been mistaken, but also in what way they had erred. One
could see why and how the homelessness of the place had been
exaggerated. One could see how the level was just above (not, as in
Holland, below) the mean of the tides. One could discover the manner in
which communication from the open sea was possible. The deeps lead out
through the sand; they are but continuations under water of that
tide-scouring which is the note of all the place inland, and out, far
out, we could see the continuation of the river-beds, and at their
mouths far into the sea, the sails.
A man sounding as he went before the north-east wind was led by force
into the main channels. He was "shepherded" into Lynn River or Wisbeach
River or Boston River, according as he found the water shoaler to one
side or other of his boat. So must have come the first Saxon pirates
from the mainland: so (hundreds of years later) came here our portion of
that swarm of Pagans, which all but destroyed Europe; so centuries
before either of them, in a time of which there is no record, the
ignorant seafaring men from the east and the north must have come right
up into our island, as the sea itself creeps right up into the land
through these curious crevices and draughts in the Fenland wall.
Men--at least the men of our race--have made everything for themselves;
and they will never cease. They continue to extend and possess. It is
not only the architecture; it is the very landscape of Europe which has
been made by Europeans. In what way did we begin to form this difficult
place, which is neither earth nor water, and in which we might have
despaired? It was conquered by human artifice, of course, somewhat as
Frisia and the Netherlands, and, as we may believe, the great bay of the
Cotentin were conquered; but it has certain special characters of its
own, and these again are due to the value in this place of the tides,
and to the absence of those natural dykes of sand which were, a thousand
years ago, the beginnings of Holland.
* * * * *
Two methods, working side by side, have from the beginning of human
habitation reclaimed the Fens. The first has been the canalisation, the
fencing in of the tideways; the second has been the banking out of the
general sea. The spring tides covered much of this land, and when they
retired left it drowned. Against their universal advancing sheet of
water a bank could be made. Such a bank cut off the invasion of the
hundreds of runnels, small and great, by which the more ordinary tides
that could not cover the surface had yet crept into the soil and soaked
it through.
When such a bank had been built, gates, as it were, permitted the water
to spend its force and also to use its ebb and flow for the draining of
the land beyond. The gates which let the tide pour up and down the main
ways became the new mouths of the main rivers; inland the courses of the
rivers (which now took all the sea and thus became prodigious) were
carefully guarded. Even before trenches were dug to drain the fields
around, earth was thrown up on either side of the rivers to confine them
each to one permanent channel; nor did the level of the rivers rise, or
their beds gets clogged; the strength of the tide sufficed for the
deepening of their channels. Into the rivers so fortified the other
waterways of the Fens were conducted.
By these methods alone much of the land was rendered habitable and
subject to the plough. Probably these methods were enough to make it all
it was in the Middle Ages. It was only far later, almost in our own
time, that water was gathered by trenches in the lowland beneath the
rivers and pumped out artificially with mills; nor is it quite certain
even now that this method (borrowed from Holland) is the best; for the
land, as I have said, is above and not below the sea.
Of these words, whose tradition is immemorial, the greatest, of course,
are the sea-walls.
Perhaps the river-walls came first, but the great bank which limited
and protected the land against the sea is also older than any history.
It is called Roman, and relics of Rome have been found in it, but it has
not the characteristic of Roman work. It runs upon no regular lines; its
contour is curved and variable. It is surely far older than the Roman
occupation. Earth, heaped and beaten hard, is the most enduring of
things; the tumuli all over England have outlasted even the monoliths,
and the great defensive mounds at Norwich and at Oxford are stronger and
clearer cut than anything that the Middle Ages have left. This bank,
which first made Fenland, still stands most conspicuous. You may follow
it from the Nene above Sutton Bridge right over to Lynn River, and again
northward from Sutton Bridge (or rather, from the ferry above it) right
round _outside_ Long Sutton and Holbeach, and by Forsdyke Bridge and
_outside_ Swyneshead; everywhere it encloses and protects the old
parishes, and everywhere seaward of it the names of the fields mark the
newest of endeavours.
* * * * *
We returned from a long wandering upon the desolate edges of the sea to
the bank which we proposed to follow right round to the mouth of the
Ouse: a bank that runs not straight, but in great broken lines, as in
old-fashioned fortification, and from which far off upon the right one
sees the famous churches of the Wringland, far off upon the left a hint
beyond the marshes and the sands of the very distant open sea.
A gale had risen with the morning, and while it invigorated the
travellers in these wastes it seemed to increase their loneliness, for
it broke upon nothing, and it removed the interest of the eye from the
monotonous sad land to the charge and change of the torn sky above, but
in a sense also it impelled us, as though we were sailing before it as
it swept along the edge of the bank and helped us to forget the
interminable hours.
The birds for whom this estuary is a kind of sanctuary and a place of
secure food in all weathers, the birds swept out in great flocks over
the flats towards the sea. They were the only companionship afforded to
us upon this long day, and they had, or I fancied they had, in their
demeanour a kind of contempt for the rare human beings they might see,
as though knowing how little man could do upon those sands. They fed all
together upon the edge of the water, upon the edge of the falling tide,
very far off, making long bands of white that mixed with the tiny
breaking wavelets. Now and then they rose in bodies, and so rising
disappeared; but as they would turn and wheel against the wind, seeking
some other ground, they sent from moment to moment flashes of delicate
and rare light from the great multitude of their wings. I know of
nothing to which one may compare these glimpses of evanescent shining
but these two things--the flash of a sword edge and the rapid turning in
human hands of a diaphanous veil held in the light. It shone or glinted
for a moment, then they would all wheel together and it disappeared.
So, watching them as a kind of marvel, we saw distant across the sea a
faint blue tower, and recognised it for Boston Stump, so many, many
miles away.
But for the birds and this landmark, which never left us, all the length
of the dyke was empty of any sight save the mixing of the sea and the
land. Then gradually the heights in Norfolk beyond grew clearer, a
further shore narrowed the expanse of waters, and we came to the river
mouth of the Ouse, and caught sight, up the stream, of the houses of a
town.