Of all the estuary towns, Maldon, at the head of the Blackwater, is the pearl. Its situation on a hill, with a tine tidal lake in front of it, is superb, and the strange thing in its history is that it should not have been honored by the brush of Turner. A thoroughly bad railway service has left Maldon in the eighteenth century for the delight of yachtsmen who are content to see a town decay if only the spectacle affords esthetic pleasure.
There is a lock in the river just below Maldon, leading to the Chelmsford Canal. We used this lock, and found a lock-keeper and lock-house steeped in tradition and the spirit of history. Beyond the lock was a basin in which were hidden two beautiful Scandinavian schooners discharging timber and all the romance of the North. The prospect was so alluring that we decided to voyage on the canal, at any rate as far as the next lock, and we asked the lock-keeper how far off the next lock was. He said curtly:
“Ye can’t go up to the next lock.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s only two feet of water in this canal. There never was any more.”
We animadverted upon the absurdity of a commercial canal, leading to a county town, having a depth of only two feet.
He sharply defended his canal.
“Well,” he ended caustically, “it’s been going on now for a hundred or a hundred and twenty year like that, and I think it may last another day or two.”
We had forgotten that we were within the influences of Maldon, and we apologized..
Later—it was a Sunday of glorious weather—we rowed in the dinghy through the tidal lake into the town. The leisured population of Maldon was afoot in the meadows skirting the lake. A few boats were flitting about. The sole organized amusement was public excursions in open sailing-boats. There was a bathing-establishment, but the day being Sunday and the weather hot and everybody anxious to bathe, the place was naturally closed. There ought to have been an open-air concert, but there was not. Upon this scene of a population endeavoring not to be bored, the ancient borough of Maldon looked grandly down from its church-topped hill.