564 MR. W. G. CLARKE ON BRECKLAND CHARACTERISTICS. 
by constant trimming, and many of the lines of fir trees now 
bordering plantations were originally hedges, but have ceased 
to be trimmed. Within the past three years about 10 miles 
of spruce hedges have been planted on the Shadwell Estate. 
The estates have tended to become bigger and bigger and the 
whole area of Breckland is now owned by a comparatively few 
people. One estate covers roughly 26 square miles of country, 
another 20, and a third 18. Within the past ten years many 
miles of roadway previously open to the fields have been fenced, 
and the district does not, in consequence, appear so open as 
formerly. Nevertheless, Breckland is still the wildest district 
in Norfolk or Suffolk. Writing in 1872, Mr. S. J. B. Skertchly 
said : “ From Thetford to the Fens, so barren is the land that 
one is often reminded of the deserts of Africa, rather than of 
English scenery. Hardly a drop of surface-water is to be 
found, and for miles there is neither ditch, pond, nor spring.”' 
The Rev. C. Kent also says : “ I have spent a month in the 
Sahara, and the part near Brandon reminds me vividly of it.” 
All the heaths are, however, broken up by boundary banks, 
some of them 6 or 8 feet in height. Few of them have meaning 
for moderns. Some mark parochial or hundred boundaries ; 
of the remainder some perhaps bounded trackways originally 
marked off thousands of years ago ; others are the boundaries 
of the ancient common fields. 
Soon after the close of the glacial period much of this 
district appears to have bordered salt-water creeks which 
formed part of the sea that then covered the fenland, creeks 
represented by the valleys of modern streams and by divergent 
valleys now dry. That the fen basin then stood somewhat 
lower than at present is shown by the existence of gravels 
containing marine shells at March and other places in the 
fen plain. Mr. F. W. Harmer, F.G.S., informs me that the 
level of these beds at March is about 15 feet above O.D. and 
they contain, with the non-British shell Cyrena fluniinalis T 
a fauna somewhat more boreal than that of the North Sea 
at present, and while newer than the chalky boulder clay, 
probably late Pleistocene rather than recent. There are also 
in the Fenland several shell-bearing deposits more recent 
