I could see the further valley broadening among woods, to the warmer places; and I went down beside the River Red-cap onwards, whither it pleased me to go.

A FAMILY OF THE FENS

Upon the very limit of the Fens, not a hundred feet in height, but very sharp against the level, there is a lonely little hill.  From the edge of that hill the land seems very vague; the flat line of the horizon is the only boundary, and that horizon mixes into watery clouds.  No countryside is so formless until one has seen the plan of it set down in a map, but on studying such a map one understands the scheme of the Fens.

The Wash is in the shape of a keystone with the narrow side towards the sea and the broad side towards the land.  Imagine the Wash prolonged for twenty or thirty miles inland and broadened considerably as it proceeded as would a curving fan, or better still, a horseshoe, and you have the Fens:  a horseshoe whose points, as Dugdale says, are the corners of Lincolnshire and Norfolk.

All around them is land of some little height, and quite dry.  It is ooelitic on the east, chalky on the south, and the old towns and the old roads look from all round this amphitheatre of dry land down upon the alluvial flats beneath.  Peterboro’, Cambridge, Lynn, are all just off the Fens, and the Ermine street runs on the bank which forms their eastern frontier.

This plain has suffered very various fortunes.  How good the land was and how well inhabited before the ruin of the monasteries is not yet completely grasped, even by these who love these marshes and who have written their history.  Yet there is physical evidence of what was once here:  masses of trees but just buried, grass lying mown in swathes beneath the moss-land, the implements of men where now no men can live, the great buried causeway running right across from east to west.

Beyond such proofs there are the writers who, rare as are the descriptions of medieval scenery, manage to speak of this.  For Henry of Huntingdon it was a kind of garden.  There were many meres in it, but there were also islands and woods and orchards.  William of Malmesbury writes of it with delight, and mentions even its vines.  The meres were not impassable marshes; for instance, in Domesday you find the Abbot of Ramsay owning a vessel upon Whittlesea Mere.  The whole impression one gets from the earlier time is that of something like the upper waters of the rivers in the Broads:  much draining and a good many ponds, but most of the land firm with good deep pastures and a great diversity of woods.

Great catastrophes have certainly overcome this countryside.  The greatest was the anarchy of the sixteenth century; but it is probable that, coincidently with every grave lesion in the continuity of our civilisation, the Fens suffered, for they always needed the perpetual attention of man to keep them (as they so long were, and may be again if ever our people get back their land and restore a communal life) fully inhabited, afforested, and cultured.