The Sea-Country of Mehalah by J. Wentworth Day. Page 2.
Photo John Tarlton

The Ray, half island, half mud and saltings, lies opposite Mersea Island on the Essex marshes. Here Mehalah, heroine of Baring-Gould's novel, lived with her mother in a desolate farmhouse.

... houseless, manless, goes marching down the coast for a dozen lonely miles. The tides ebb out for a mile or more. If you are lost in a duck - punt in a winter fog, as I have been, sea and land melt into grey, terrifying nothingness. You can only tell the direction of the land when the tide has ebbed by the lie of seaweed and eel - grass on the mud.

A country of high skies and incredibly clear lights, of drifting sea - fogs and sharp tides. An old, old land of beauty and mystery haunted by Roman and Dane, East Saxon and Norman, and by all that rough crew of smugglers and wreckers, wildfowlers and fisherman, poachers and marsh - men whose immemorial kingdom it is.

Landward, miles of rough grass marshes, cattle - dotted, seamed by reedy `fleets` where wild duck nest and reed - warblers chitter in the reeds, melt into low uplands, bright with corn. Great farmhouses, built when the Armada was boding threat, stand wthin moats starred by water-lilies, sentinelled by cloudy elms. They and their villages bear names that echo Saxon and Roman, Dane and Norman. Most of them lie at the head of lonely creeks. In the old days sprit-sailed barges glided, red - sailed, above the land the village hithes with cattle and corn, coals and wood, or stacked high with hay. The old green `barge roads`, raised causeways of grass, still run from many a farmyard to forgotten havens where weed - grown posts stand memorial to the rough seamen who tied up there.

There is such an old green road from the off-buildings at Decoy Farm on Bohun`s Hall at Tollesbury to Thurslet Creek, a name not used locally. Across the fields lie Tolleshunt D`Arcy Hall and Bourchier`s Hall; the first within a perfect moat, the second with fragments of a homestead moat. Within a gunshot of Bourchier`s Hall stand the ...

Transcribed by Joe Vince

Previous Page
Next Page