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j We publish in this column articles and notes which may help our readers in their plans for travel at home and abroad. They are written by correspondents who have visited the places described. The following article deals with a little known part of the country, and illustrates the use which may be made, in planning a holiday, of the new motor-coach network which covers England to-day.]
The Fen Country
Do you know the Fen Country ? You have, of course, passed through it, but he who runs may not read it. Many eyes hunger for the hills, specially in summer, moreover the hills are the fashion. For some speakers the word ugly always qualifies flat when they speak of the countryside. But if the Fenland is one's own land, or if one goes to visit it in a spirit of friendship, how full it is of satisfaction, a satisfaction as much of the heart as of the eyes. Stretches of corn land feed the imagination, and just now the corn is ripe, water is always alive and the sky, the eternal symbol of the whence and the whither, has a new importance in this country. Here on the plains Nature is wonderfully intimate. She makes no stranger of us and she creates no awe. We see her very sad and that very often, but oh ! the pleasure of her content ! When the sun, Milton's " Arch-chemic," makes all things new after the rain what is there left to wish for ? You cannot see far, there are as it were no anxieties, no forebodings in a flat landscape, there is no sense of the ceaseless necessity to SURMOUNT. The heavens brood over the earth and shut out that mysterious to-morrow which lies behind hills, and is pregnant with deferred hope or oncoming fear according as the soul is born to courage or misgiving. Let the man whose heart fails him plunge into the plains for awhile, in spite of David.
But not all even of the sons of the Fen love their country. Its scenery has totally opposite effects upon different types of mind. It has always been so. To William of Malmsbury writing in eleven hundred the Fen Country at Thorney repre- sented " a very paradise for that in pleasure and delight it resembleth Heaven itself, the plain there is as level as the sea neither is there any waste place in it." Perhaps William was there at the best time of the year, where in "the summer- land of harvest " the fogs were forgotten. History shows also that the climatic and aquatic changes recorded on the Great Level have been unaccountably great. Skertchly in his history of the Penland Past and Present thinks the worst time was just before the vast attempt at drainage made at the end of the sixteenth century. There have always been traditions of marvellous fertility even when the largest tracts of land stood under water and travellers spoke of the Fens as a dark unhealthy region, the abode of devils and of a stupid half savage people. This last, of course, was never true. Some of the finest churches in England are landmarks on the level, and Skertchly believes not only that education was unusually general from Lincoln to Quy, a distance of seventy miles, but that the Fenland was " the cradle of classic English." Nowhere were there so many monasteries, or so many men with leisure and desire to think, he tells us, and if we forget the spelling it is amazing how modern the medieval English of the Fens does read. He quotes at length from the verses of Robert Manning who wrote in 1303 " The Handlynge of Synne," when with a French treatise before him " For lewde men y undertoke on Englyssh tunge to make this boke." The bits he likes best Mr. Skertchly quotes with modern spelling :-
" No dearer is there in God's herd
Than a chaste woman with a lovely word."
In these days of country 'buses no car, not even a pushbike, nor even very young legs, are necessary to take us into a country which was once almost inaccessible and is still quite unspoiled. Willingness to walk a mile or two from the main road and to spend a very few shillings on short day's outings is all that is asked of us. Say you find ythirself like the present writer at Cambridge and would like to see Hemingford Gray, one of the most beautiful of the Fen villages. You take the St. Ives 'bus from the centre of the town, stop it after about an hour and a quarter's run, a mile outside St. Ives, and walk about a mile (the conductor will direct you) to this fascinating group of timbered cottages beside the Ouse. The river washes the wall of the churchyard, and its roses look down into the water. All the rivers in this country have artificial banks and you can sit literally by the clear water and look across the brilliant green meadows dotted with pollard willows to the white spire of Hemingford Abbot. If you like to go back on your steps, and regain the high road you can walk another mile, and go across a medieval bridge with a disused chapel on it into the sleepy town of St. Ives, where you can eat cheaply at a modem tam shop in the market place, opposite to a handsome dissenting chapel. If you are a person who likes to play at living in the Merry England of the far past
you can forget all about the bun shop and the 'buses and the chapel if you will saunter up to the fine perpendicular church which again is close to the river. Inside its walls the illusion you are cultivating will be confirmed. You will be invited to forget the Reformation. Then back to the market place and back to Cambridge. Not counting your tea you will only have spent about 2s. 6d.
Another day go to Ely round by Swaffham Prior and Wicken and Soham. It only costs 3s. return to Ely. But if you really want to enjoy yourself you should Make three expeditions of this round. There are two Swaffhams, i.e., Swaffham Prior and Swaffham Bulbeck. The first is inter- esting as having been a commercial centre, served before the railways by straight waterways or lodes cut through the fen from the river to the firm ground on which the village stands. Swaffham Prior is a rather depressing place. It has two churches in one churchyard dedicated to St. Mary and St. Cyriac. The towers alone are of architectural interest.
Some modern windows in St. Mary's are lovely in colour. The windows of St. Cyriac are plain and are mostly broken. One can look in at the locked and disused edifice through the holes. The sight is unspeakably desolate. If you give Swaffham a miss you must on no account omit to see Wicken Fen, it is one of the very few bits of primitive undrained fen left, strange birds are to be seen and strange flowers found there. It is only about a mile square but it looks immense and in the midst of that vast mile we shall feel the fascination or the menace of the sea, according as we are made. Soham is only seven or eight miles from Ely along a dead straight road, the historic Causeway made by Hervey Le Breton in 1125. There was once a monastery at Soham which was destroyed by the Danes. The magnificent church somewhat chilling in its bare grandeur was built about the time of the Causeway. Most people who care for cathedrals at all have seen Ely Cathedral and, therefore, will miss no possible opportunity of seeing it again. The beauty of its " divinely tall and most divinely fair arches " have nowhere their equal. The fascination of their height and of the painted roof brings everyone into church looking upwards.
It is pleasant to go back to Cambridge by another route through Stretham which is on the edge of the raised Isle. Beyond this quiet village of suburban association it is difficult to enumerate the colours of the level between Stretham and Cambridge. The present writer tried on August 8th, the wheat, which seems specially red this year, being only begun to be cut. The different golds of the corn, the different greens of the root crops, the green greys of the pollard willows, the great stretches of clover, and the rare patches of mustard and occasional dabs of poppy colour make the ignorant long for the painter's craft and the painter despair of it. " I wish they would drive slower," said a woman lamenting the pace of modern travel. " Some only see their destination but I can always see beauty."
By all accounts the most beautiful place in all the Fens is not near Cambridge, all the same it is get-at-able by 'bus from there. It is Crowland Abbey, about eight miles from Peterborough. To Peterborough and back from Cambridge is 5s. and probably an extra shilling or ls. 6d. would take one on. The present writer looks forward to the trip but has not yet ventured so far. Here is an account of what you may see there, written fifty years ago in explanation of a delicious little chromolithograph. " The peat lands possess distinctive features which are very impressive. It is upon these black plains that the mirage is most frequently observed. I have seen from the battlements of Crowland Abbey the whole of the Wash refracted upwards and traced the black smoke of the steamers. At other times I have seen beautiful silvery shimmering lakes reflecting every tree upon their bosoms. Yet, again, the landscape has been distorted, trees and spires being inverted and looming in gigantic proportions." If only one could enjoy this wonderful experience ! It would; indeed, be worth a three-hours' motor run and twice as many shillings The present writer hopes to have more than one try. Will his forbears buried in the Fens beg the favour of the vision for a degenerate Cockney excursionist in whose veins their blood still runs ? No such luck he fears.
[We shall be glad to answer queries arising out of the Travel articles published in our columns. Inquiries should be addressed to the Travel Manager, The SPECTATOR, 99 Gower Street, W.C.1.—Ed. SPECTATOR.]
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