n ancient
land. There should be a demarcation between them, a tide mark or limit.
There is nothing. You cannot say where one begins and the other ends.
One does not understand the Fens until one has seen that shore.

The sand and the mud commingle. The mud takes on little tufts of salt
grass barely growing under the harsh wind. The marsh is cut and wasted
into little islands covered at every high tide, except, perhaps, the
extreme of the neaps. Down on that level, out from the dyke to the
uncertain line of the water, you cannot walk a hundred yards without
having to cross a channel more or less deep, a channel which the working
of the muddy tides has scoured up into the silt and ooze of the sodden
land. These channels are yards deep in slime, and they ramify like the
twisted shoots of an old vine. Were you to make a map of them as they
engrave this desolate waste it would look like the fine tortuous cracks
that show upon antique enamel, or the wandering of threads blown at
random on a woman's work-table by the wind.

There are miles and miles of it right up to the EMBANKMENT, the great
and old SEA-WALL, which protects the houses of men. You have but to
eliminate that embankment to imagine what the whole countryside must
have been like before it was raised, and the meaning of the Fens becomes
clear to you. The Fens were long ago but the continuation inland of this
sea-morass. The tide channels of the marsh were all of one kind, though
they differed so much in size. Some of these channels were small without
name; some a little larger, and these had a local name; others were a
little larger again, and worthy to be called rivers--the Ouse, the Nen,
the Welland, the Glen, the Witham. But, large or small, they were
nothing, all of them, but the scouring of tide-channels in the light and
sodden slime. It was the high tide that drowned all this land, the low
tide that drained it; and wherever a patch could be found just above the
influence of the tide or near enough to some main channel for the rush
and swirl of the water to drain the island, there the villages grew.
Wherever such a patch could be found men built their first homes.
Sometimes, before men civic, came the holy hermits. But man, religious,
or greedy, or just wandering, crept in after each inundation and began
to tame the water and spread out even here his slow, interminable
conquest. So Wisbeach, so March, so Boston grew, and so--the oldest of
them all--the Isle o