A NORFOLK BROAD.
THE RIVERS OF EAST ANGLIA.
The Crouch: Foulness—Little Barsted and Langdon—Canewdon—Rayleigh—Hockley Spa. The Blackwater: Saffron Walden—Radwinter—Cadham Hall and Butler—Booking—Braintree—Felix Hall—Braxted Lodge—Tiptree-Maldon. The Chelmer: Thaxted—The Dunmows—Great Waltham—Springfield—Chelmsford—Mersea Island. The Colne: Great Yeldham—Castle Hedingham—Halstead—Colchester. The Stour: Kedington—Sudbury—Flatford and John Constable—Harwich. The Orwell: Stowmarket—Barham—Ipswich. The Deben: Debenham—Woodbridge—Felixstowe. The Alde: Aldborough—Southwold—Halesworth. The Waveney: Diss—Bungay—Mettingham—Beccles—Breydon Water—Horsey Mere. The Bure: Hickling Broads—St. Benet’s Abbey—Salhouse and Wroxham Broads—Hoverton Great Broad—Horning Ferry—Fishing in the Broads. The Yare: Norwich—Yarmouth.
After the Medway and the Thames have delivered their great contributions to the sea, the peculiar Essex coast country—flat, marshy, and often very uninteresting—is sufficiently served by a number of small streams of little note in literature, and generally as commonplace in appearance as in the duties they perform. There are exceptions, which will be duly indicated, but with regard to the majority of the streams of East Anglia, poet has not sung nor painter wrought his magic art. If not remote, unfriended, or melancholy, they are, it cannot be denied, slow. During the hot summer-time, when the level fields through which they meander are quivering with heat-haze, and the pastures and hedgerows are ablaze with the wild flowers which love fat pastures and flourish upon them, the upper waters are choked with luxuriant tangles of aquatic vegetation, and the current is barely sufficient, without the frequent application of scythe and water-rake to the thickets below water, to turn the rustic mills planted upon their banks. The dainty trout loves not the muddy beds and lazy flow of these rivers, which will be found to be much more numerous than is commonly supposed; but the waters are the natural home of the eel, pike, roach, bream, and other specimens of the so-called coarse fishes, or summer spawners, of Great Britain. A purely pastoral country is that watered by these narrow reed-margined rivers, famous for grain, roots, and grassy acres, with good soil where the solid earth lies so low that the hand of man must perforce sometimes exert itself to save it from the inroads of the salt sea. Let us follow the coast-line from the north shore of the Thames, abounding in marshes that have been so well described by Dickens in “Great Expectations,” and by the author of “Mehalah” in his novels.
The first river is the Crouch, whose estuary is still the groundwork of a remunerative oyster fishery. Anything more dreary than the shores of this long and gaping river-mouth can scarcely be imagined. The beacons out at sea tell the tale of danger, and point to the dread Maplin sands, and the treacherous shoals that culminate in the fatal Goodwins. True, upon Foulness the tenants of Lord Winchilsea most successfully reclaimed a space of forbidding foreshore from the sea, but as a rule these expanses yield little better than coarse marsh grass, wild fowl, and everlasting salt; and the island of Foulness, which is formed by the curvature of one of the smaller channels, half river and half creek, that abound in these parts, is the oasis of this marshy desert. Yet the church on the island, which was built less than forty years ago, occupies the site of one which was founded in the twelfth century, and the Danes, as every schoolboy is taught, built themselves forts hard-by, and made camps that have left their landmarks to this day. At high water the Crouch estuary is a pleasant enough arm of the sea, and as the river is navigable for brigs of respectable tonnage at Burnham, and for smaller craft to Fambridge Ferry, the ruddy and white-sailed boats impart a refreshing liveliness to the scene. Especially is this the case when the little fleet of oyster boats are on active service.
