66 326 AROUND ELY CHAP. Any one who explores the Fenlands around Ely soon finds that, apart from a few churches, the interest of the district is in its past rather than its present. If he goes to Soham, along the old causeway built by Hervé le Breton, the first bishop of Ely, he sees, instead of the vast mere which King Canute crossed on the ice, a rich but monotonous tract of cornland; the 'mare de Soham" of the old chroniclers is now a sea of verdure. If he has visited Oliver Cromwell's house at Ely he may be disposed to go to Wicken, where the Protector's son lived after the Restoration and was buried in the little village church. Near Haddenham, and about seven miles from Ely, is Aldreth, the scene of the Conqueror's attempt to bridge the fens and of one of Hereward's most successful raids upon the Normans. In Kingsley's romance there are two chapters, based upon Liber Eliensis and De Gestis Herwardi Saxonis, which deal graphically with the fighting on the Aldreth bridge or causeway. Along the bridge came the Normans, a “dark column of men," beneath whose weight the slim structure bent and sunk till the soldiers were ankle-deep in the miry waters of the fen. Still they pressed on, having set their minds on gaining the Camp of Refuge or dying in the attempt. And die they did; for when the English, led by the fearless Wake, came down upon them, the tumult caused the strained bridge to give way, and the luckless Normans sank and were choked in the peaty slime. "Thousands," says Kingsley, "are said to have perished. Their armour and weapons were found at times by delvers and dykers for centuries after; are found at times unto this day, beneath the rich drained cornfields which now fill up that black half-mile; or in the bed of the narrow brook to which the Westwater, robbed of its streams by the Bedford Level, has dwindled down at last." One of the men who tried to cross the bridge escaped. He was that gallant Sir Deda, who, after felling the Wake with a sword stroke on his helm, was ringed round by fierce Saxons and compelled to surrender to his fallen foe. He was taken to Ely, and there XI FAREWELL TO THE FENS 327 treated so well that when he returned to William's camp at Brandon his only complaint was (to quote the words Kingsley has put in his mouth), that he was suffering from a "surfeit of good victuals and good liquor," for of good cheer, he said, there was plenty on the beleaguered isle. The heaping-up of a circular earthwork at Willingham, near Aldreth, has been attributed to the Normans who fought and died in that attempt to cross the fens; but though they may have occupied it, it is the work of a people who dwelt and fought there long before the Normans' time. And now I am about to leave the Fenland and return to the upland heaths and towns. And I am going to leave it, not by one of its firm level roads along which it has been so pleasant and easy to cycle, but by the speedier and more prosaic railroad, to which for once in the course of my travels I am glad to resort for a while. For I am bent on getting as quickly as I can to Brandon; and on asking direction at Ely I find that where Norman William was unable to make a crossing over the fens there is still no direct road. A cattletender or dyker might, no doubt, be able to find a way; but a cyclist, unless he is willing to go round by Mildenhall and travel through an uninteresting district, does well to make the journey by rail. So from the heights of the historic Isle I take a last long look across the sunlit levels, and while I do so, and think of what I have seen of them since I left Lynn, I cannot but agree with Kingsley that "They have a beauty of their own, these great fens, even now, when they are dyked and drained, tilled and fenced- a beauty as of the sea, of boundless expanse and freedom . . . Overhead the arch of heaven spread (s) more ample than elsewhere, as over the open sea; and that vastness. gives such cloudlands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else within these isles." .... ON a grey day when the clouds hang low over the warrens, and the belts of firs on the ridges are often hidden by a mist of rain, Brandon's outward aspect is singularly dreary. Under ordinary circumstances there is something depressing about the place its black flint houses seem in continual mourning; but on a dull wet day it is so utterly dismal that words cannot describe it. For nearly two hours I have stood at the open doorway of a flint-knapper's working-shed, listening to the splashing of the rain and the wailing of the wind outside, and the monotonous tap-tapping of the flint-workers within. The owner of the shed, who sits on a low stool, nursing flints as a cobbler does a boot, has tried to cheer me by telling me that it was fine yesterday and "as like as not " it will be fine again to-morrow; but I do not heed him, and gloomily wonder when I shall be able to start on my journey across the Great Warren. I have had enough of Brandon, though I only arrived here this morning. I feel that I have seen enough of flint houses, flint chapels, flint sheds, flint garden walls, and heaps of chalkwhitened flints to last me a lifetime. As for the prehistoric flint pits at Weeting, my experiences during the hours when I wandered in search of them over what seemed interminable miles of warren and heathland I am not likely soon to forget. CH. XII "GRIMES GRAVES" 329 For while I was in the midst of a wide tract of waste land, which had no track along which I could cycle or drive, I was caught in a drenching rain storm, which in a little while filled all the hollows of that wide waste with pools of water. Still I pressed on, determined that having gone so far I would not return without having seen the far-famed "graves." Plovers cried mournfully around me, as though warning me to venture no further into that dreary waste; the wind wailing among the rugged firs was as the voice of desolation; no rabbit peered from its burrow, no lizard rustled among the wiry ling. I tried to convince myself of the fact that it was June, and that yesterday I had heard the larks singing over the fruitful fields of the Isle of Ely; but all I could imagine was that this was the "lonesome October," and that I was wandering through the "misty midregion of Weir." Knee-deep in last year's wet, withered bracken, for as yet the green croziers of the new leaves were unopened, I stumbled along, facing the wind-driven, blinding rain; and a warrener who was hastening towards home and shelter, stared after me wonderingly. I could imagine him believing me a criminal fleeing from justice and seeking safety in the lone places of the world; and again I could picture him telling his wife of the dishevelled madman he had met out on the waste. How far I wandered out of my way I cannot say; but I know that two hours elapsed before I found "Grimes Graves," and the flint-knapper has since told me that I might have reached them in half an hour. And when I had found them, in a kind of plantation in the midst of that wild waste, what did I see?—an earthwork surrounding innumerable hollows of varying size and depth, but almost all overgrown and choked with a rank growth of nettles! The pits, for all one could tell by looking at them, might have been ten or ten thousand years old. As in the case of the "Shrieking Pits" of Aylmerton, there was nothing in their outward appearance to indicate or suggest their age or origin. But the name they bear, and by which they have been known for many centuries, proves that the Saxon settlers 330 PREHISTORIC FLINT PITS CHAP. found them looking very much the same as they do to-day, and were puzzled as to who had made them. "Grimes Graves" suggests Grimspound, the ancient settlement on Dartmoor, and the Hundred in which they are situated is the Grimshoe Hundred, the court of which was held on a large howe or tumulus at the east end of this strange group of pits. The etymon of the "Grim" in each case has been the subject of much discussion; but etymologists have found it in grima, which means the grim or evil one. Since visiting, under such unpleasant circumstances, these "Devil's Pits" at Weeting, I have tried to learn something more about them than can be gathered in the course of a superficial examination. I find that there are in all 254 of them; that they are grouped within an area of about twenty acres; and that although they are now more than half filled with earth and decayed vegetation, it is known that many of them were originally quite forty feet deep. By carrying out extensive investigations, Canon Greenwell solved, to his own and other antiquaries' satisfaction, the mystery of their origin. They are, he says, nothing more nor less than flint-workings from which the men of the Neolithic Age procured the flints they fashioned into weapons of warfare and the chase. Picks made of deer antlers were discovered lying side by side with axes and arrow-heads of the Neolithic period; and with little difficulty Canon Greenwell was able to trace subterranean galleries in the chalk, excavated by the prehistoric wielders of the primitive picks. So it was conclusively proved that flint-knapping was carried on in the neighbourhood of Brandon ages before guns were invented or flints were first used in the building of churches and houses—sɔ long ago, indeed, as the days when men lived in holes in the earth and pile-dwellings in the fens. This is not to say, as some have said, that flint-knapping has been in progress at Brandon ever since the Stone Age, for there was a wide interval between the days when flint axes were used and those when weapons of |