THE RIVER ORE.
171EW rivers in England have so many names, or such strange -12 adventures, as the Suffolk Ore, which, after flowing for sixteen miles imprisoned by the pebble bank of Orford Beach, joins the sea at last in Hollesley Bay. It begins life some- where in Mid-Suffolk as the " Ore." Above Aldeburgh it widens into broad lakes bounded by hills, and is called on maps the " River Alde," but by those who live on it or by it the "Iken River." At Aldeburgh it ought, by all the rules of river behaviour, to fall into the sea, but, the broad and swelling flood turns at right angles to its course, and flows south and still south, refusing the sea, enclosing a vast area of level and fertile marshes, and barred from uniting with the waves by the ever-growing shingle bank which the tides have built up century after century between it and the main ocean. From the lofty summit of. Orford. Keep, which Bartholomew de Glanville held for Henry. IL to guard this side entrance to his kingdom, the visitor may see today, as the Norman soldier did when he watched the Flemish army sail up the stream to attack his impregnable walls eight centuries ago, the whole plan of this long- drawn labyrinth of river, marsh, and sea. No one who has climbed to the fortress-top and looked over the land it guarded will descend without an increased respect for the stern and practical soldiers who built the tower, and a desire to sail the broad waters which glitter beneath its walls. Beyond the river lie the King's Marshes, enclosed to feed the cattle of the garrison and to grow the corn for the Castle mill, and on the ness beyond stands the tower of Orford Light. Below are Havergate Island and Butley Creek and the distant masts in Orford Haven, and westward, below the setting sun, the park and hall of Sudbourne, with its marshes, woods, and decoys. The Ore is perhaps the only large river in this country on which there is no town, into which no filth or sewage ever falls, and on which there is scarcely a village on all the lower reaches; for Aldeburgh is built, not on the river, but on the sea, and Orford stands back from its banks, and though thickly peopled with the memories of the past, numbers little more than a thousand souls. Thus some twenty miles of navigable river are still left to the fisherman, the fowler, and the amateur boat-sailer, and unspoilt by any single item of modern change which could injure the natural play of life upon its waters, its banks, and those peculiar features made by.sea and tide, the pebble ridge without, and the islands and creeks within. The fishery of the river is a very ancient one, probably dating from the days when King John held the manor and sold Orford a charter, for the town still owns it and lets the right of oyster-dredging. These Orford oysters are an interesting race. They are indigenous to 'the river, self-supporting, and like those hens which were advertised as always laying their own eggs for breakfast, deposit their own spat in the river-bed, and maintain their race and place with credit and distinction. They are, in the writer's opinion, the best-flavoured oysters in England, and some of the cheapest, because, as the bottom of the river is pebbly and the tides swift, the Orford oysters have to make good strong shells for themselves, and are con- sequently not eo elegant in appearance as Whitstable natives. There is off the Butley Creek a hole many fathoms deep, into which the tides bring these and other shells, and with them great numbers of the largest and most respected living oysters in the river. These shed their spat on to the mass of old shells or " cinch " collected in the deep holes and ready for them. Thus the process of oyster-farming is carried out by the river itself. Up one of the creeks, by Butley Abbey, the infall of fresh water is so full of oyster- food that when formerly the fish were removed from the main river and laid there to fatten they were like sheep on a too rich pasture. They grew so- fat that they burst ! Now the long arm of modern commerce has reached Butley Creek. Oysters are brought from the Atlantic coast of America and laid to fatten in this little-known estuary, and the waters in which the monks of the Priory used to catch flatfish for fast days are now giving hospitality to these Transatlantic strangers from Blue Point.
The soles, herrings, smelts, and the other fish of the Ore would demand the second place in any notice of the produce of the river, were they not for the time entirely eclipsed by the recent capture of an enormous angler fish, which was justly described by the town-crier as being almost as long as be was, and well worth a penny entrance-fee while it lay on view in the shed usually reserved for the exhibition of marine rarities captured off the town. The river marshes and salt- ings and the pebble bank maintain two separate and attrac- tive classes of plants and of living animals peculiar to such places, and in the case of the pebble bank only matched in one place in England, the Chesil Beach connecting Portland Island with the shore at Abbotsbury. The millings are narrow, but very rich in sea flowers; sea lavender of two kinds, samphire, glasswort, and orach, marsh pimpernel and thin grass grow there in shaggy lines of glaucous green, broken by clear pools and creeks of salty water. " Gillies," the small shore crabs, are the only visible inhabitants of these creeks and pools. They sit out on the banks enjoying the air at low tide, and scuttle into their holes when frightened, like rabbits. Sometimes one "guile" taking a walk on the mud below passes under another " gillie " who is sitting on the bank. The latter instantly drops on to the back of the passer-by with a hollow rattle, and punches him with his claws until he makes off and ceases to trespass. Terns, redshanks, stone plover, peewits, and lesser terns breed in numbers on the pebble bank, and being carefully protected in the nesting-time, have much increased. All the birds in the above list are now common on the river banks, and curlew have also appeared from the North. Hares and wild pigeons also visit the pebble hank
in-numbers, attracted there mainly by a single plant, so rare and so curious in its growth that it instantly invites atten- tion. It is a wild pea, with broad, dark-green leaves and bright purple flowers, which grows in flat masses on the arid pebble bank, and covers with its foliage the loose brown stones. The dark, luscious green of its leaves and the abundant pods, full of small rouncipeas, attract both the bares and the wood pigeons, the former being said sometimes to swim the river to reach this favourite yet arid feeding-ground. The deeds from which the plants spring are buried very deep in the bank, so deep that they lie in contact with the rain-water which collects in the lower levels of the shingle. A single threadlike stem pushes its way up several feet through the interstices of the stones and spreads in wide mats of leaves and flowers on the surface. The nourishment of the plant must be mainly due to absorp- tion by the leaves.
All things have an end, even Orford Beach; yet when the limit of the pebble bank is reached at last the change comes as a surprise. After sailing mile after mile down the long, grey river, with its smooth natural embankment of pebbles on the one hand, and the misty levels of the marshes behind the artificial river hank on the other, we seem to have entered on a side-path of that " Ocean Stream " which ancient fancy. pictured as encircling the entire rim of the olds terrarum which, like a flat and circular cake, made up. the Armaments of dry land. Neither pebble bank, nor shore,, nor river gives the slightest sign, by change of shape or contour, or by increasing depth of waters, that the river which cannot get out is at last free to join the sea which cannot get In, until from the bed. of the stream there comes Up through the water a shrill sound muffled by the tide, the " singing " of the stones at the bottom as the tide-race rolls them in from the bar. The flood Comes up stronger and stronger, swirling, eddying, and swelling, the sea-wind blovis over the bank in broader and he. sher gusts, the sea swallows and gulls float and hover More thickly on the banks, the pebble ridge grows suddenly steeper and steeper till it fringes the river like a wall, narrows; and ends, and there, racing round the last pile of shingle is the tide-race, and the broad gap of light and water where sea:an. d river meet. The river. is not flowing into the sea. It is the North Sea which is pouring into the river, for the tidal swell moving down between Norway and Britain raises the level of the sea, and this mass of swirling water is seen rushing " downhill " in flood, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, into the broad bed of the Ore, where it will advance unchecked mile after mile inside Orford Ness and the pebble ridge, past Aldeburgh, and round inland into the Then River, taking the salt sea-water, with soles, and shrimps, and gillie crabs, smelts, dabs, and other sea beasts, far up among the heaths, cornfields, and woods of the inland farms. To watch from the last yard of the ten-mile shingle ridge the escape of the river or the infall of the sea is to. be a free spectator of an unusual instance of the play of natural forces; for while we must suppose that the set of the ocean tides built up and smoothed out the barrier that bars the river from the sea, the sudden breach in the wall through which the Ore falls sideways into the ocean, or the swollen sea is spilled in like manner into the river, seems like one of the accidents of Nature, and a break in its order. The ocean tide does not " set" directly on the land, neither does the Ore fall squarely into the sea. It is an accidental rencontre, a chance conjunction of sea and river, in which neither seems yet to have made up its mind to consider the union permanent.
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