146 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
likened Walden Pond to an eye of the earth. And this is 
another. On the south the plantation forms a bushy eyebrow, 
whilst the belt of rush and sedge bordering the water’s edge 
forms the eyelashes, reflected likewise in the liquid depths. 
Ringmere is a circular, crater-shaped hollow, and is the 
smallest save one of the meres on the heath, the Punch Bowl 
being more diminutive. The word mere is Anglo-Saxon, signi- 
fying a piece of water, a lake, a pool. Lakes, however, are 
generally long and narrow; meres are round or oval. Ringmere 
is in the form of an amphitheatre. Blomefield says of it: “It is 
a very old mere or large water, as the Saxon name which it still 
bears tells, Ringmere being no other than the Round Mere or 
Water.” All the meres are situated on the upper boulder clays, 
and occupy higher levels than the broads. They were probably 
formed by glacial action wearing away the beds above the chalk. 
Tradition says, with every degree of probability, that a battle 
was fought on the surrounding heathland. John Brame, a monk 
of Thetford, assigned it to a semi-mythical Arthurian period ; but 
history records it as being fought in the middle of May, 1010. In 
King Olaf’s Saga, the ‘ Heimskringla,’ mention is made of this 
great fight in the following passage :— 
* From Hringmar field The living fly, 
The chine of war, The dead piled high, 
Sword striking shield, The moor enrich, 
Rings from afar. Red runs the ditch! ” 
And in mentioning many of high degree who here met their 
doom, the Saga goes on to say— 
‘‘ Hringmare Heath 
Was a bed of death; 
Harfager’s heir 
Dealt slaughter there.” 
It was likewise held by the late Mr. Mark Knights, in his 
‘Peeps at the Past,’ that a Ketel’s Bridge at Wretham (? where) 
was a surviving relic of the name of the East Anglian ealdorman, 
Ulfketel, who led the Saxon forces in this battle against the 
Danes. It is not so very many years ago that pilgrimages were 
paid to Ringmere at harvest time. If it was full of water, the 
