Littleport is now quite a thriving and prosperous place, with a shirt-factory employing over 300 hands and a most effective system of agriculture in the reclaimed fens around. It has a fine Early English church, and a grand tower, through the basement of which goes the footway of the street. Until the nineteenth century the place was so inaccessible by land that the Cambridgeshire annalist Carter (1752) tells us that "it is as rare to see a coach at Littleport as a ship at Newmarket." From Littleport the road pursues its level way for seven miles across the fen, till, after crossing the small islet of Hilgay, it strikes the Norfolk uplands at their south-western corner, hard by Denver Sluice; the present boundary of the North Sea tide, which once ran up almost to Cambridge. This magnificent Sluice is the keystone of the whole drainage scheme of the fenland. Here the New and the Old Bedford Rivers, whose start we saw at Earith (p. 280), once more rejoin the Ouse, having conveyed in twenty-two miles the waters which by the old channel would have taken thirty-three. This, of course, gives them a better fall, and renders them less liable to silt themselves up. Practically the New River does all the work, very little water being in the Old except what the tide brings up. It is a striking sight to be on the Sluice at high water and gaze at the sea waves ridging up this old river with force that seems illimitable. And yet not enough pass in, before the ebb calls them back, ever (or hardly ever) to reach Earith, as a glance at the channel there instantly shows. Still more striking is it to be on the Sluice when the spring tides are on, and see the sea on the north of the Sluice standing fifteen or twenty feet higher than the fresh waters on the south. One realises what widespread disaster would ensue if the Sluice were to give way. Small wonder that during the Fenian dynamite scare of 1867 the place was watched day and night by a guard of soldiers. The Sluice itself is a massive dam of stonework; having a big lock with two sets of gates, one against the stream of the river, the other against the tideway of the sea, which reaches this point by a broad cut from the important seaport of King's Lynn.