The left-hand loop, through Landbeach, if an inferior road, has more wayside interest. Landbeach is in Domesday Book called "Utbech," that is to say Outbeach, or Beach out (of the water). "Beach" in this and other Fenland instances means "bank"; Waterbeach being thus "water bank." Wisbeach, away up in the extreme north of the county, is a more obscure name, but on inquiry is found to mean Ousebank, that town standing on the Ouse in days before the course of that river was changed. Landbeach Church stands by the wayside, and has its interest for the ecclesiologist, as conceivably also for those curious people interested in the stale and futile controversy as to who wrote Shakespeare's plays; for within the building lies the Reverend William Rawley, sometime chaplain to Bacon, and not only so, but the author of a life of him and the publisher of his varied acknowledged works. He, if anyone, would have known it if Bacon had been that self-effacing playwright, so we must needs think it a pity there is so little in spiritualism save idiotic manifestations of horseplay and showers of rappings in the dark; otherwise the obvious thing would be to summon Rawley's shade and discreetly pump it.

Beyond Landbeach, close by the fifty-sixth milestone from London, the modern road falls into the Roman Akeman Street, running from Brancaster (the Roman "Branodunum") on the Norfolk coast, through Ely, to Cambridge, to Dunstable, and eventually, after many leagues, to Bath. Those who will may attempt the tracing of it back between this point and Cambridge, a difficult enough matter, for it has mostly sunk into the spongy ground, but here, where it exists for a length of five miles, plain to see, it is still a causeway raised in places considerably above the levels, and occasionally showing stretches of imposing appearance. It remains thus a striking monument to the surveying and engineering skill of that great people, confronted here in far-off times with a wilderness of reeking bogs. The object in view—to reach the coast in as straight a line as possible—meant wrestling with the difficulties of road-making in the mixed and unstable elements of mud and water, but they faced the problem and worked it out with such completeness that a solid way arose that only fell into decay when the civilisation they had planted here, on the rim and uttermost verge of the known world, was blotted out. Onwards as far as Lynn a succession of fens stretched for sixty-five miles, but so judiciously did the Romans choose their route that only some ten miles of roadway were actually constructed in the ooze. It picked a careful itinerary, advancing from isle to isle amid the swamps, and, for all its picking and choosing of a way, went fairly direct. It was here that it took the first plunge into the sloughs and made direct, as a raised bank, through them for the Ouse, where Stretham Bridge now marks the entrance to the Isle of Ely. How that river, then one of great size and volume, was crossed we do not know. Beyond it, after some three miles of floundering through the slime, the causeway came to firm ground again where the village of Stretham (its very name suggestive of solid roadway) stands on a rise that was once an island. Arrived at that point, the road took its way for ten miles through the solid foothold of the Isle of Ely, leaving it at Littleport and coming, after struggling through six miles of fen, to the Isle of Southery. Crossing that islet in little more than a mile, it dipped into fens again at the point now known as Modney Bridge, whence it made for the eyot of Hilgay. Only one difficulty then remained: to cross the channel of the Wissey River into Fordham. Thenceforward the way was plain.

We have already made many passing references to the Fens, and now the district covered in old times by them is reached, it is necessary, in order to make this odd country thoroughly understood, to explain them. What are the Fens like? The Fens, expectant reader, are gone, like the age of miracles, like the dodo, the pterodactyl, the iguanodon, and the fancy zoological creatures of remote antiquity. Ages uncountable have been endeavouring to abolish the Fens. When the Romans came, they found the native tribes engaged upon the task, and carried it on themselves, in succession. Since then every age has been at it, and at length, some seventy or eighty years ago, when steam-pumps were brought to aid the old draining machinery, the thing was done. There is only one little specimen of natural fen now left, and that is preserved as a curiosity. But although the actual morasses are gone, the flat drained fields of Fenland are here, and we shall presently see in these pages that although the sloughs are in existence no longer, it is no light thing in these districts to venture far from the main roads.

No one has more eloquently or more truly described the present appearance of the Fen country than Cobbett. "The whole country," he says, "is as level as the table on which I am now writing. The horizon like the sea in a dead calm: you see the morning sun come up, just as at sea; and see it go down over the rim, in just the same way as at sea in a calm. The land covered with beautiful grass, with sheep lying about upon it, as fat as hogs stretched out sleeping in a stye. Everything grows well here: earth without a stone so big as a pin's head; grass as thick as it can grow on the ground."

The Fenland has, in fact, the wild beauty that comes of boundless expanse. Only the range of human vision limits the view. Above is the summer sky, blue and vast and empty to the sight, but filled to the ear with the song of the soaring skylark, trilling as he mounts higher and higher; the sound of his song diminishing as he rises, until it becomes like the "still small voice of Conscience," and at last fades out of hearing, like the whisper of that conscience overwrought and stricken dumb.

These levels have a peculiar beauty at sunset, and Cambridgeshire sunsets are as famous in their way as Cambridge sausages. They (the sunsets, not the sausages) have an unearthly glory that only a Turner in his most inspired moments could so much as hint at. The vastness of the Fenland sky and the humid Fenland atmosphere conspire to give these effects.

The Fenland is a land of romance for those who know its history and have the wit to assimilate its story from the days of fantastic legend to these of clear-cut matter-of-fact. If you have no reading, or even if you have that reading and do not bring to it the aid of imagination, the Fens are apt to spell dulness. If so, the dulness is in yourself. Leave these interminable levels, and in the name of God go elsewhere, for the flatness of the Great Level added to the flatness of your own mind will in combination produce a horrible monotony. On the other hand, if some good fairy at your cradle gave you the gift of seeing with a vision not merely physical, why, then, the Fenland is fairyland; for though to the optic nerve there is but a level stretching to the uttermost horizon, criss-crossed with dykes and lodes and leams of a severe straightness, there is visible to the mind's eye, Horatio, an ancient order of things infinitely strange and uncanny. Antiquaries have written much of the Fens, but they do not commonly present a very convincing picture of them. They tell of Iceni, of Romans, fierce Norsemen marauders, Saxons, Danes, and the conquering Normans, but they cannot, or do not, breathe the breath of life into those ancient peoples, and make them live and love and hate, fight and vanquish or be vanquished. The geologists, too, can speculate learnedly upon the origin of the Fens, and can prove, to their own satisfaction at least, that this low-lying, once flooded country was produced by some natural convulsion that suddenly lowered it to the level of the sea; but no one has with any approach to intimacy with the subject taken us back to the uncountable æons when the protoplasm first began to move in the steaming slime, and so conducted us by easy stages through the crucial and hazardous period when the jelly-fish was acquiring the rudiments of a backbone (if that was the order of the progress) to the exciting era when the crocodile played the very devil with aboriginal man, and the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus wallowed in the mud. The Iceni are very modern, compared with these very ancient inhabitants, and have done what those inarticulate protoplasms, neolithic men and others, could not do; that is, they gave their names to many places in these East Anglian shires, and a title that still survives to a great road. Look on any map of East Anglia and the surrounding counties and you shall see many place-names beginning with "Ick": Ickborough, Ickworth, Ickleton, Icklington, Ickleford, and Ickwell.

These are the surviving names of Icenian settlements. There is a "Hickling" on the Broads, in Norfolk, which ought by rights to be "Ickling"; but the world has ever been at odds on the subject of aspirate or no aspirate, certainly since the classic days of the Greeks and the Romans. Does not Catullus speak of a certain Arrius who horrified the Romans by talking of the "Hionian Sea"? and is not Tom Hood's "Ben Battle" familiar? "Don't let 'em put 'Hicks jacet' there," he said, "for that is not my name."

When the Romans came and found the Iceni here, the last stone-age man and the ultimate crocodile (the former inside the latter) had for ages past been buried in the peat of the Fens, resolving into a fossil state. The Iceni probably, the purposeful Romans certainly, endeavoured to drain the Fens, or at least to prevent their being worse flooded by the sea; and the Roman embankment between Wisbeach and King's Lynn, built to keep out the furious wind-driven rollers of the Wash, gave a name to the villages of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpole (once Wall-pool). When the Romano-British civilisation decayed, the defences against the sea decayed with it, and the level lay worse flooded than before. Far and wide, from Lynn, on the seacoast in the north, to Fen Ditton, in the south, almost at the gates of Cambridge; from Mildenhall in the east, to St. Ives and Peterborough in the west, a vast expanse of still and shallow water covered an area of, roughly, seventy miles in length and thirty in breadth: about 2100 square miles. Out of this dismal swamp rose many islands, formed of knobs of the stiff clay or gault that had not been washed away with the surrounding soil. It was on these isles that prehistoric man lived, and where his wretched wattle-huts were built beside the water. He had his dug-out canoe and his little landing-stage, and sometimes, when his islet was very diminutive and subject to floods, he built his dwelling on stakes driven into the mud. In peaceful and plenteous times he sat on his staging overhanging the water, and tore and gnawed at the birds and animals that had fallen to his arrow or his spear. Primitive man was essentially selfish. He first satisfied his own hunger and then tossed the remainder to his squaw and the brats, and when they had picked the bones clean, and saved those that might be useful for fashioning into arrow-heads, they threw the remains into the water, whence they sent up in the fulness of time an evil smell which did not trouble him and his in the least, primitive as they were in every objectionable sense of the word.

Relics of him and his domestic odds and ends are often found, ten feet or so beneath the present surface of the land. His canoe is struck by the spade of the gaulter, his primitive weapons unearthed, his dustbin and refuse-heap turned over and examined by curious antiquaries and naturalists, who can tell you exactly what his menu was. Sometimes they find primitive man himself, lying among the ruins of his dwelling, overwhelmed in the long ago by some cataclysm of nature, or perhaps killed by a neighbouring primitive.

To these isles in after centuries, when the Romans had gone and the Saxons had settled down and become Christians, came hermits and monks like Guthlac, who reared upon them abbeys and churches, and began in their several ways to cultivate the land and to dig dykes and start draining operations. For the early clergy earned their living, and were not merely the parasites they have since become. These islands, now that the Fens are drained, are just hillocks in the great plain. They are still the only villages in the district, and on those occasions when an embankment breaks and the Fens are flooded, they become the islands they were a thousand years ago. The very names of these hillocks and villages are fen-eloquent, ending as they do with "ey" and "ea," corruptions of the Anglo-Saxon words "ig," an island, and "ea," a river. Ely, the largest of them, is said by Bede to have obtained its name from the abundance of eels, and thus to be the "Eel Island." There are others who derive it from "helig," a willow, and certainly both eels and willows were abundant here; but the name, in an ancient elision of that awkward letter "h," is more likely to come from another "helig," meaning holy, and Ely to really be the "holy island."

Other islands, most of them now with villages of the same name, were Coveney, Hilgay, Southery, Horningsea, Swavesey, Welney, Stuntney, and Thorney. There was, too, an Anglesey, the Isle of the Angles, a Saxon settlement, near Horningsea. A farm built over the site of Anglesey Abbey now stands there.

But many Fenland place-names are even more eloquent. There are Frog's Abbey, Alderford, Littleport, Dry Drayton and Fenny Drayton, Landbeach and Waterbeach. Littleport, really at one time a port to which the ships of other ages came, is a port no longer; Fenny Drayton is now as dry as its fellow-village; and Landbeach and Waterbeach are, as we have already seen, not so greatly the opposites of one another as they were.