ON THE ORWELL AT IPSWICH.
Ipswich is well situated on rising ground with a southern aspect, and Gainsborough, who lived here, and Constable, who knew it well, thought highly of the district of which it is the capital. Constable said of it, “It is a most delightful county for a painter. I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree.” Ipswich in many a quaint corner and irregular street gives evidences of its age. The merry dog Rochester, boon companion of a merry king, saw Ipswich once in the small hours of the morning, and described it as a town without people on the banks of a river without water. The tide was out at that time, and the banks of the Orwell are to this day a marvellous acreage of muddy foreshore at low water. But Ipswich has always been a prosperous town, and its leading inhabitants flourishing men of mark. In these days it is the headquarters of agricultural implement manufacture, sending labour-saving machinery to all parts of the world. The busy ironworks extend along both banks of the river. New docks are established where a new cut has been made to serve them. Ocean-going ships and fleets of “billy-boys” from Goole and elsewhere lie along the wharves. Public buildings, in a fine modern group, attest the progress of Ipswich with the advancing times. Even the Grammar School, one of Queen Elizabeth’s foundations, has been reared in the newer town. The wealthy merchants, trading with the Continent, used to live in the midst of the people on the lower land; their villas now stud the heights overlooking the river. Yet here and there an antique chimney, an old-world doorway, indicate where the solid old houses once stood. In the Butter Market there is a marvellous piece of ancient architecture, a house front quaintly timbered and embellished with carvings chiselled centuries ago; and the inhabitants love to believe that this is one of the numerous houses in England in which Charles the Second hid from those who sought his life. Also is the visitor taken to see a gate through which it is affirmed entrance was obtained to Cardinal Wolsey’s cottage. The Ipswich of to-day, however, with its water and steam mills, its export business in boots and shoes, its great ironworks, is, in East Anglia, the conspicuous type of go-aheadness, and when the Orwell is at high tide the outlook from the heights is of extreme beauty. The estuary then is a lovely stretch of scenery; gently rising hills laid out with grounds and country seats, diversified by woods and high cultivation, appear on either side, and the estuary from grassy shore to grassy shore is covered with water, dotted with white-sailed yachts and craft of more serious order.
The river Deben runs in a parallel direction with the Orwell, rising a short distance northward of Debenham, becoming navigable at Woodbridge (where Crabbe learnt surgery), and making estuary near Felixstowe, the favourite watering-place of southern Suffolk. Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, thus grandiloquently described the section of the coast:—
“On that shore where the waters of Orwell and Deben
Join the dark heaving ocean, that spot may be found:
A scene which recalls the lost beauties of Eden,
And which Fancy might hail as her own fairy ground.”
The poet Crabbe, to whom passing reference has been already made, was born at Aldborough, the quiet seaside town which receives its name from the little river Alde, and which was the subject of the poem “The Borough.” The stream passes close to the town, but instead of making for the sea close by, turns abruptly south, and follows the line of the coast, within sound of the ocean, for several miles, past Orford, to Hollesley Bay. North of Aldborough is Southwold at the mouth of the river Blythe, another minor stream, navigable to Halesworth, a picturesquely situated town below Hevingham.