Very early next morning, and by one of these stations, another man and I took train to a bridge called Sutton Bridge, where one can cross the River Nen, and where (according to the map) one can see both the sea-walls, the old and the new. It was my plan to walk along the shore of the Wash right across the flats to Lynn, and so at last perhaps comprehend the nature of this curious land.
When I got to Sutton Bridge I discovered it to be a monstrous thing of iron standing poised upon a huge pivot in mid-stream. It bore the railway and the road together. It was that kind of triumphant engineering which once you saw only in England, but which now you will see all over the world. It was designed to swing open on its central pivot to let boats go up the River Nen, and then to come back exactly to its place with a clang; but when we got to it we found it neither one thing nor the other. It was twisted just so much that the two parts of the roads (the road on the bridge and the road on land) did not join.
Was a boat about to pass? No. Why was it open thus? A man was cleaning it. The bridge is not as big as the Tower Bridge, but it is very big, and the man was cleaning it with a little rag. He was cleaning the under part, the mechanisms and contraptions that can only be got at when the bridge is thus ajar. He cleaned without haste and without exertion, and as I watched him I considered the mightiness of the works of Man contrasted with His Puny Frame. I also asked him when I should pass, but he answered nothing.
As we thus waited men gathered upon either side—men of all characters and kinds, men holding bicycles, men in carts, afoot, on horseback, vigorous men and feeble, old men, women also and little children, and youths witless of life, and innocent young girls; they gathered and increased, they became as numerous as leaves, they stretched out their hands in a desire for the further shore: but the river ran between.
Then, as being next the gate, I again called out: When might we pass? A Fenland man who was on duty there doing nothing said, I could pass when the bridge was shut again. I said: When would that be? He said: Could I not see that the man was cleaning the bridge? I said that, contrasting the bridge with him and his little rag, he might go on from now to the Disestablishment of the English Church before he had done; but as for me, I desired to cross, and so did all that multitude.
Without grace they shut the bridge for us, the gate opened of itself, and in a great clamorous flood, like an army released from a siege, we poured over, all of us, rejoicing into Wringland; for so is called this flat, reclaimed land, which stands isolated between the Nen and the Ouse.
Was I not right in saying when I wrote about Ely that the corner of a corner of England is infinite, and can never be exhausted?
Along the cut which takes the Nen out to sea, then across some level fields, and jumping a ditch or two, one gets to the straight, steep, and high dyke which protects the dry land and cuts off the plough from the sea marshes. When I had climbed it and looked out over endless flats to the sails under the brune of the horizon I understood the Fens.