Tradition gives Reach seven churches; but for this there is no historical evidence whatever, and it is probably only a hyperbolical way of extolling the ancient importance of the place. It is now merely a chapelry under Swaffham Prior, in which parish the western side of the township[145] is situated. For here the houses run in two lines, about a hundred yards apart, with a little village green between, on a gentle slope some quarter of a mile in length, having the fen level as its lower boundary, and, for the upper, the stupendous bulk of the Devil's Dyke, here cut clean off as if with a knife. All looks ancientry itself; but, in fact, this cutting off of the Dyke is quite a modern affair, not yet even two centuries old. Till then the Dyke ran right through the village down to the fen itself, effectually isolating the Swaffham Prior houses on the west from those on the east, which belong parochially to Burwell. Cole, the prince of Cambridgeshire chroniclers, whose voluminous MS. notes on the county still await a publisher, mentions that when he visited Reach in 1743 the Dyke still reached the fen; but when he came again in 1768 he found the present state of things. Of how, or by whom, this act of vandalism was perpetrated I can find no record.
Reach was of importance even in Roman days. The Dyke, of course, was already ancient when they ruled Britain, and the lode, too, may very probably have been already cut. The remains of one of their villas have been unearthed here, near the point where the Cambridge and Mildenhall railway now cuts through the Dyke. It has a well-preserved hypocaust, or apparatus for warming the house by hot air. The Roman "villa," we must remember, was the country mansion of the period, and equipped with every known luxury. In the Middle Ages the annual Fair at Reach (on the Monday before Ascension Day) was big enough to bring over the Mayor of Cambridge to open it. And the custom survives even today, when the occasion has dwindled to a very petty little gathering.
Reach, however, has still a local industry; the cutting of the peat, or "turf" as it is here called, in the neighbouring fen, for use as fuel. This peat forms a layer often many feet in thickness, and is formed for the most part of moss, mingled with the vegetable mould made by the decay of the dense forests with which the district was covered for uncounted ages; before its final submergence, early in the Christian era, destroyed the last of them. A like subsidence had more than once produced the same results earlier; for the remains of four or five forest beds at different levels have been found in the peat.
The trunks of these prehistoric trees are often of enormous size, especially the oaks.[146] One no fewer than 130 feet in length was unearthed in 1909. The wood, after its ages of immersion, has become black, hard, and heavy, like the Irish bog oak. Associated with such débris, the peat often furnishes remains of the dwellers in these archaic woodlands; whence we know that bears, wolves, wild boars, and gigantic wild bulls roamed their shades. In the skull of one of these last, now in the Sedgwick Geological Museum at Cambridge, is imbedded a flint axe-head. The arm of the primeval savage who wielded that weapon must have been strong beyond the arms of common men.
Burwell Church, West End.
The peat is cut with a spade of peculiar construction, being flat, and both longer and narrower than ordinary spades. It is shaped somewhat like a fire shovel with a flange on either side, the object being that each "turf" extracted should be of uniform size, like a brick. A thousand of these should go to the ton; but though uniform in size they are not of uniform weight, for the peat, as might be expected, is more dense at its lower levels than near the surface. There is a good market for this turf, which makes a hot and lasting fire with a minimum of smoke, and that pleasant smoke. It is mostly sent off by water to Cambridge, Ely, Wisbech, etc.
This turf-cutting is not, of course, confined to Reach, but it has its greatest development here, and at the neighbouring village of Burwell, a mile or so to the eastward (to which, as we have seen, part of Reach belongs). Burwell is an important village of considerable extent, with a population of 2000, and a magnificent church, capable of seating them all. It is of the finest fifteenth century workmanship, with a few remains of Norman in the tower. The exterior is mostly flint; the interior, like that of so many churches in Cambridgeshire, is of "clunch," a hardened form of chalk, well adapted for building, and easily worked for carving. The beautiful sculptures of the Lady Chapel at Ely are of this material, drawn from the large quarries between Burwell and Reach. Clunch is found in many places throughout the county and has been worked (as existing remains show) ever since Roman days.