FISH AND FOWL IN THE NORFOLK MEAL. MARSHES.
ON the coast of North Norfolk, for some sixteen miles from Brancaster to Blakeney, there is now growing up one of the most remarkable natural reclamations to be seen in our islands. The area now added, or in process of being added, to the land is, roughly speaking, forty square miles, fringing the original shore for a depth of from one and a half miles to two and a half miles. Though this is a fact remark- able in itself, the origin, present condition, and vegetable and animal life of the "meal-marshes," as they are locally called, make the whole area one of extraordinary interest to the naturalist. Considered from the point of view of mechanical structure, these vast flats are a level of fat, alluvial soil, averaging from 10 ft. to 15 ft. of rich, soaplike earth laid upon the old sea-bottom, intersected by creeks large and small, up which the tide rushes at every flood. But the whole surface, instead of being mud and slime, is covered with dense vegetation like that of a Bea-moor, and the deposit has been so rapid that at present only the highest tides ever cover the surface of the "meals."
We do not know that any one has answered the question, "Whence came the soil that has made the meal-marshes ?" By "common form" they ought to have been made either by mud carried down by rivers and spread along the shore, as, for instance, the Lymington river spreads the soil of the New Forest along the foreshore of the Solent, or by the deposit left by the daily flood-tide, advancing over the bottom of a muddy sea, and depositing the silt on the shore. But here there is not a single stream larger than a brook to lay down these forty square miles of new land, and the sea. bottom opposite the meal-marshes and for a score of miles out into the North Sea is not mud, but one vast shoal of bright and shifting sand. It is clear, therefore, that this new land was not transported from the adjacent sea-bottom. Yet the form of the " meal-marshes " indicates that the soil has been deposited by the tides, and history shows that the process has been extraordinarily rapid. There is evidence of this even in the soil of the new land, for recently at a depth of 8 ft. the wicker-work of a fisherman's basket was found, in which the osiers had been cat with a knife, and finished off in quite modern fashion. As the few brooks which debouch on the new land could never have made more than the most insignificant contri- bution to its formation, and the bottom of all the adjacent sea is not earth but sand, it must be inferred that the soil of the " meal-marshes " has been transported from a distance by the sea. Some twenty miles to the east beyond Cromer the sea is washing away the land almost as fast as it is adding to it on the northern coast. But the inference that it is this soil which forms the meal-marshes is unlikely, because all the currents and tides setting from the East show clear water. The main rush of current and tide comes on to the meal- marshes from the West, rushing out of the estuary of the Wash, and these tides are thick and muddy. The bottom of the Wash itself is sand ; but it is known that mud is capable of almost infinite subdivision in water, and the cunclusion as to the recent formation of the Norfolk meal-marshes is as follows. The whole of these hundreds of millions of tons of soil have been originally brought into the Wash by the great rivers of the Fens. The constant efforts of engineers to increase the current of the outfall of the Fen rivers have had for result that only a part of the earth held in suspension in their flooded water is dropped upon the bottom near their mouths. The rest is carried like floating clouds across thirty miles of sea, and laid in compact and ever-increasing layers on a dis- tant and disconnected coast.
In the present month the surface of the new land, and the ebb and flow of the waters in its creeks, present a scene of unique beauty and interest. In parts of the marsh the flowers of the sea-lavender literally cover the ground, flower touching flower, with hundreds of acres of unbroken violet-grey. On the wetter parts the "crab grass" clusters like deep heather, and on the mounds and little lawns of grass, curlews, whimbrel, gulls, redshanks, and terns sit all day basking in the summer sun. As the writer sat up to his waist in sea-lavender and screened by thick bushes of that strange plant, the suwda, which seems capable of living in all shapes, from mere pink bacilli lying on damp sand, to a bush as tall as broom, he saw the whole bird population of the meal-marsh enjoying their siesta. On the fringe of a muddy creek, all set round with young green samphire, were some thirty whimbrel, or "May-birds," as the gunners call them, with three or four curlews keeping sentry on the mud close by. A flock of gulls were washing themselves in a brackish pool close by, and others were floating in from the sands to join them. Stone- plover and a pair of shell-ducks were also sitting on a shingle- bed near the sea-lavender marsh, and the only birds not half- asleep were the redshanks and a flock of terns, which constantly shifted from creek to pool. The terns had dis- covered a shoal of small fish, and were dropping into one of the deeper creeks in a regular volley of dives and plunges. In the creek we met one of the old fowlers of the shore rowing up to get a shot at the curlews. He was variously equipped, having a coil of fishing-lines, a shrimping- net, and two guns. The lines he had used earlier, at the seaward mouth of the creek, but had taken no fish. "The tides," he remarked, were so heavy that "the poor things got carried past the hooks." Among the curlews he had better fortune, or rather availed himself of an acquired skill which was sufficiently surprising. Paddling up, under shelter of the creek, to within some three hundred yards of where the curlews and "May-birds" sat, he whistled the shrill note of the curlew, at the same time shaking his cap over the edge of the creek, and then uttering the screaming whistle with redoubled energy. In an instant every curlew and " May- bird " near rose and came flying across the flats straight to the point at which he lay, and he kept them hovering and returning, until he had shot three of these wild and wary birds in an almost open flat.
This exhibition of the fowlers' art drove away all bird-life for the time ; but the creatures in the falling waters of the creeks were sufficiently amusing. The stream swarmed with " gillies," bold, bad, unpleasant little crabs, the "street arabs" of the tideway paths. When he thinks he is not observed, the gillie prowls thoughtfully along frontways, picking up hits of rubbish with his claws, or catching and killing any smaller and softer creature he meets. If he sees a man he rt■shes off sideways, over mud or water, shaking his big claw- like fists with an air of insolent and furious defiance. Once in the water he instantly sinks himself in the mud, digging fast with his small claws, until, with one final snap of defiance from his big claws, he vanishes in the mud. " Tracking " flat-fish is one of the minor sports of the creeks. The " butts " and flounders leave a trail on the sand, and if this is followed the fish may be seen, lying all covered with sand, and only showing a wry mouth and a pair of eyes through the sand-grains. The gunners follow op the fish, and catch it by setting their naked foot upon the flounder's back. This primitive fishing has a certain lazy charm ; but the ideal form for the artistic capture of all the creek fishes left in the channels at the ebb-tide would be the employment of trained cormorants. If any local gunner or boatman would rear a brood of these clever birds, and train them, they would earn a living for themselves and him during the summer months, and bring in a certain revenue from visitors carious to witness their performance.
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