CHAPTER VII 



THE LAST ENGLISH HOME OF THE BEARDED TIT 



' When Ducks by scores travers'd the Fens, 

 Coots, Didappers, Rails, Water-hens.' 



'Antiquarian Hall,' The Fen-Man. 



IN the memoir of the Geological Survey of the country 

 round Cromer is a rough sketch-map of the outline of 

 the north-west corner of Europe as in all probability it 

 existed at the Newer Pliocene period, in the far-off 

 days when the primitive vegetation and monstrous 

 creatures of a still earlier world were slowly giving 

 place to plants and animals of 'more of the recent' 

 types. 



A great river, since dwindled to the insignificant 

 Rhine, with its mushroom castles and ruins, swept 

 through fir woods and swamps to an estuary hemmed 

 in to the westward by a coast-line unbroken, excepting 

 here and there by a tributary stream, to John o' Groat's, 

 rolling down in its sluggish current stumps of trees 

 and bones of elephants and bears and beavers, to be 

 washed long ages afterwards from the ' Forest Beds ' of 

 Sheringham and Runton. 



The swamps through which the old estuary once cut 

 its way lie buried now in places a hundred feet and 



