ITS ANCIENT ASPECT. 43 



These ever-active causes have converted the dry land into the fens. 

 The mud brought down by the rivers cannot get away to sea ; and, 

 with the debris of the coast, is constantly swept southward by tide 

 and current, and deposited within the great curving basin of the Wash, 

 between Lincolnshire and Norfolk. There it is kept by the strong 

 barrier of shifting sands coming inwards from the sea ; a barrier 

 which also confines the very water of the fens, and spreads it inland 

 into a labyrinth of streams, shallow meres, and bogs. The rainfall, 

 over the whole vast area of dull level, has found no adequate 

 channels of escape for centuries ; and hence we may understand how 

 peat the certain product of standing water has slowly overwhelmed 

 the rich alluvium, and swallowed up gradually the stately forests of 

 fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which once spread far 

 and wide over the blooming country. 



" Many a green isle needs must be 

 In the deep wide sea of misery," 



sings Shelley ; and this dreary outcome of mudbank and bog and 

 mere had its wooded isles, very fair and lovely to behold, redeeming 

 the desolation of the landscape. Such were Ramsey, Lindsey, 

 Whittlesea, whose names remind us of their whilome characteristics 

 (ea, ey, an island). In these green places the old monks loved to 

 build their quiet abbeys, rearing their herds in rich pastures, feeding 

 fat fish in their tranquil streams, and dreaming in the shadow of 

 green alder and stately ash. 



But these Eden-isles were few, and the surrounding marsh was 

 black and dismal enough to scare the boldest spirit, and pestilential 

 enough to sap and undermine the strongest frame. The Romans had 

 attempted to drain and embank it, and their vallum may still be 

 tracked along the surface of the marsh-lands, marked to this day by 

 the names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole. In the Middle Ages, 

 however, it returned to its primeval desolateness a waste and 

 wilderness, haunted by the foul legends of an unwholesome super- 

 stition. In the immediate neighbourhood of the great monasteries of 



