By these methods alone much of the land was rendered habitable and subject to the plough. Probably these methods were enough to make it all it was in the Middle Ages. It was only far later, almost in our own time, that water was gathered by trenches in the lowland beneath the rivers and pumped out artificially with mills; nor is it quite certain even now that this method (borrowed from Holland) is the best; for the land, as I have said, is above and not below the sea. Of these words, whose tradition is immemorial, the greatest, of course, are the sea-walls. Perhaps the river-walls came first, but the great bank which limited and protected the land against the sea is also older than any history. It is called Roman, and relics of Rome have been found in it, but it has not the characteristic of Roman work. It runs upon no regular lines; its contour is curved and variable. It is surely far older than the Roman occupation. Earth, heaped and beaten hard, is the most enduring of things; the tumuli all over England have outlasted even the monoliths, and the great defensive mounds at Norwich and at Oxford are stronger and clearer cut than anything that the Middle Ages have left. This bank, which first made Fenland, still stands most conspicuous. You may follow it from the Nene above Sutton Bridge right over to Lynn River, and again northward from Sutton Bridge (or rather, from the ferry above it) right round _outside_ Long Sutton and Holbeach, and by Forsdyke Bridge and _outside_ Swyneshead; everywhere it encloses and protects the old parishes, and everywhere seaward of it the names of the fields mark the newest of endeavours. * * * * * We returned from a long wandering upon the desolate edges of the sea to the bank which we proposed to follow right round to the mouth of the Ouse: a bank that runs not straight, but in great broken lines, as in old-fashioned fortification, and from which far off upon the right one sees the famous churches of the Wringland, far off upon the left a hint beyond the marshes and the sands of the very distant open sea. A gale had risen with the morning, and while it invigorated the travellers in these wastes it seemed to increase their loneliness, for it broke upon nothing, and it removed the interest of the eye from the monotonous sad land to the charge and change of the torn sky above, but in a sense also it impelled us, as though we were sailing before it as it swept along the edge of the bank and helped us to forget the interminable hours.