_The Marsh_ in Lincolnshire is a word of peculiar significance. The whole country is either _fen_, _wold_, or _marsh_. The wolds, starting from Keal and Alford, run in two ridges on either side of the Somersby Valley, one going north to Louth and onwards, and one west by Spilsby and Horncastle to Lincoln. Here it joins the great spine-bone of the county on which, straight as an arrow for many a mile northwards, runs the Roman Ermine Street; and but for the Somersby brook these two ridges from Louth and Lincoln would unite at Spilsby, whence the greensand formation, which begins at Raithby, sends out two spurs, one eastwards, ending abruptly at Halton, while the other pushes a couple of miles farther south, until at Keal the road drops suddenly into the level fen, giving a view--east, south, and west--of wonderful extent and colour, ending to the east with the sea, and to the south with the tall pillar of Boston Church standing up far above the horizon. This flat land is _the fen_; all rich cornland and all well drained, but with few habitations, and with absolutely no hill or even rise in the ground until, passing Croyland or Crowland Abbey, which once dominated a veritable land of fens only traversable by boats, you come, on the farther side of Peterborough, to the great North Road. Such views as this from Keal, and the similar one from Lincoln Minster, which looks out far to the south-west over a similar large tract of fen, are not to be surpassed in all the land. But the Poet's steps from Somersby would not as a rule go westwards. The coast would oftener be his aim; and leaving Spilsby to the right, and the old twice-plague-stricken village of Partney, where the Somersby rivulet becomes a river, he would pass from "the high field on the bushless pike" to Miles-cross-hill, whence the panorama unfolds which he has depicted in Canto XI. of "In Memoriam": Calm and still light on yon great plain, That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, And crowded farms and lessening towers, To mingle with the bounding main. Thence descending from the wold he would go through Alford, and on across the sparsely populated pasture-lands, till he came at last to Some lowly cottage whence we see Stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh, Where from the frequent bridge, Like emblems of infinity, The trenchèd waters run from sky to sky. This describes the third section of Lincolnshire called _the Marsh_, a strip between five and eight miles wide, running parallel with the coast from Boston to Grimsby, and separating the wolds from the sandbuilt ridge Of heaped hills that mound the sea.