IN THE KING'S MARSHES AT ORFORD NESS.
WHEN Henry Plantagenet had good reason to think that the Count of Flanders would land in Suffolk with an armada, while he himself was on commando in France, he hurried on the building of the huge fortress at Orford, on the river Ore, so fast that the castle was ready almost before the garrison. Bartholomew de Glanville, the Constable, had a wonderful piece of good luck just about the time that the roof was on, for some of the Orford fishermen caught a wild man of the sea, who was kept in the castle for some time that he might be taught to be a Norman and a Christian. This unfortunate seal, for such he undoubtedly was, was severely punished, and even tortured by being hung up by his feet, because he pretended not to be able to speak ; and when taken to the church showed no sort of veneration or understanding of the relics there exhibited to him. He once escaped into the sea, and looked out of the water quasi insultans, but returned of his own accord, and lived on fish until he was forgotten and despised, when he departed into the river to return no more. Ralph of Coggeshall, who tells the story in spirited monastic Latin, concluded that the animal was probably an evil spirit which had got into the body of a drowned sailor. He suggests also that this very sad loss was due to gross carelessness, and that the monster, whether man or fish, was well worth keeping. Meantime, as the soldiers could not live on nothing but fish, which this wild man of the sea was contented with, the Governor, or some other practical person, suggested that it would be worth while to reclaim from the sea a marsh to feed sheep on, and so have prg-saU mutton for the use of Orford Castle. Which was no sooner asked than granted. The King hired the saltings from their owners for four shillings a year and sent two Normans over from Ipswich as surveyors. Three pounds eleven and sevenpence were spent that year in making the bank, and fifteen pounds later, and the Crown was the richer by some two hundred and fifty acres of firm earth. The stocking of this, perhaps the first reclamation in England since the days of the Romans, which remains almost exactly as these Normans left it, was proceeded with at once. According to the full history of the castle compiled by a Suffolk antiquary, Mr. Redstone, seven hundred sheep were bought by the Treasury, six oxen, and two horses. A ferry boat was built to take the sheep to and fro across the creek. Barley and oat seed was purchased, and probably sown, for
the marks of the furrows are still seen, and a shepherds' house and a sheepfold were built to shelter man and beast.
The King's Marshes, as they are still called, own some- thing more than historic interest. They lie enfolded in the double grip of sea and river. War and Peace look down on them on either hand, the one frowning from the grey Norman keep by Orford Town, the other casting its kindly beam from the lighthouse on Orford Point. And between the lighthouse and the marsh lies what is perhaps the most wonderful sea beach or pebble bank in England, not excepting the Chesil Beach, or the five-mile shingle bank which fronts the harbour of Blakeney. It is half a mile wide, and ten miles long, and as straight as if it had been pegged with a line. Inside it lies the wide and beautiful river, unable, and not too eager, to break the barrier, while up to its steep brown edge roll the waves of the North Sea, not dispersed in white breakers, but in great ocean swells, for the sea is fathoms deep right up to the edge of the pebble bank, and if a great ship is driven ashore she comes as kindly on to the beach as if she were a herring boat. Along this bank the North Sea lays alike its treasures and its dust. Amber and cornelian lie among coal and peat, coal washed up from drowned ships whose bunkers have burst at the bottom of Hollesley Bay, and peat from the submerged forest and marsh which lie off-shore below the North Sea. On every twenty yards is enough drift-wood of the world's forests, from bamboo to the bleached branches of Scotch fir to cook a meal for a boat's crew. These and a hundred more jetsam of the ocean lay there after the storms of early January, in the hush after the gale, when Nature was settling down again to the mild and normal winter of to-day. Over the sea beyond the bank flights of duck and widgeon were wheeling, unsettled whether to come in- land or to wait till evening darkened the flats. From the lighthouse tower a storm could be seen darkening the sky far out to the east, and the sea wind was blowing in raw and chill; but the storm burst elsewhere, the wind dropped, and the fowl sweeping to and fro, lower and lower, settled once more on the deep. In the creek between the pebble bank and the marsh a few curlews and stints were feeding, and the whistle of the redshanks showed that those ever-restless birds were on the wing over marsh and river. But the mass of the birds were all out at sea, and even at the junction of the creek and the broad grey river, where the last flight of wild swans came in, a flock of gulls wheeling was the only sign of the life of the larger birds. Had the storm come on the ducks would have been pouring in over the sea bank, as they did in the blizzard of the week before. But the fringe of the salt-marsh always holds a select winter population of small birds, besides the immense flocks of starlings that feed on the inner marshes. The larks from Norway and Denmark flit inces- santly round these brown fringes of salting, as if afraid ever to run the risk of going inland to fake again the famine born of frost and snow, and little companies of seed-eating birds flutter all day—from dawn till dusk—among the stems of sea- asters and the thrift beds, seeking the minute seeds of this thin vegetation of the shore. But late in winter the migrant stream of birds, which always make Orford Light the lowest southern limit of their arrival on the East Coast, has ceased to flow, and only a few woodcock and fieldfares cross the water to Orford Bank. Yet even on still nights, when the wildfowl fly in from the sea too high to shoot at, and often too high to see, an hour spent in waiting for "the flight" is seldom time wasted on the Orford Marshes. To the watcher standing in the marsh behind the outer bank facing seawards, waiting and watch- ing the night fall, the strangeness of this tract of laud, river, and sea becomes more and more impressive as the details of the landscape fade from sight. In front and behind are the broad river and the creek that bound the marsh, gleaming with reflected light, and filling with the lapping flood, poppling and rippling against the bank. Beyond the creek are the flat brown back of the pebble bank, the tower of the lighthouse with its kindling lamps, and the low roar of the rising sea. As the sea-wind rose at dusk and blew in from the east it cleared a channelled arc across the sky, piling the darkening clouds on this hand and on that, and clearing a broad road of misty grey, down which to drive the car of night. Then the night fell on the marshes, and the fog settled on the sea, and out of the mist came the moan of the signal horn upon the Shipwash Light, as if some belated monster of Proteus's flock were howlinglike a lost hound across the darkening sea. And the ducks? They came as they wisely do, when the night is still and misty, high and late, fast and invisible, and not a feather fell, though one gunner saw and shot at a low-flying mallard. The ducks were as safe as De Wet, and the marsh remained to be crossed on a misty, moon- less night, and after the marsh the river. Those who are familiar with these flats find their way from point to point almost un- erringly, following by some extra sense the line given by the rails on a sheep bridge they have crossed, aided by the dull glow from the darkened side of the lighthouse. They know also the depth of the wet hollows, and the steepness and width of the sea-banks, which form part of the path for foot passengers, and may be followed in the dark as Pilgrim followed his guide, nothing doubting, though the shallow " splashes " into which the travellers step look like deep and gleaming pits of water, and the ridge of the embankment between river and dyke as narrow as a pony's back. On this occasion there was ample light waiting to be kindled on the waters that flowed beside the path. The footprints of those who descended on to the shingle to the boat, opposite the quay of Orford Town, all showed, not mere sparks, but broad sheets of liquid light, which ran, and glowed, and twinkled among the stones. Each man left behind him a trail of luminous footprints, glowing on the shore, the oars dripped flame, and round the boat, as she was thrust into the river, ran little waves and dimples of light. It lapped round the sea-boots of those who launched her, and trailed in her wake behind. The whole River Ore, on this January night, was full of phosphorous light, shed by untold millions of invisible creatures, bathing the sides of the boat and the feet of those who stepped into it with this pale and innocent flame of truly living fire.
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