In a course of time, Lynn Haven is said to wear from 6 or 8 to 40 poles wide; which seems not improbable, considering the situation of it, and the accession of so many large rivers. In Badeslade’s time, as he says, {24b} it was from 50 to 60 poles in the narrowest part; and now it can be no less. The Lynn river, however, has been thought to be still narrower than any other of equal size so near its outfall. Before the erection of the said Dams, or Sluices no complaints appear to have been made of either the haven, or yet the rivers above wanting a competent depth of water. Barges carrying 40 chalders could then go up the Ouse 36 miles, and those that carried from 26 to 30 chalders passed with ease to the very town of Cambridge. Whereas, in Badeslade’s time, flat bottom lighters, with eight or ten chalders, could hardly pass. Nor does it appear that things have gotten to a better state since. As to the haven, or harbour of Lynn, it was at those times wide, deep, and commodious. In 1645 its breadth is said to have been about a furlong. Ships then, and for some years after, rode at the south end of the town, and the west side in two fathoms, at low water. So they also did at the Crutch; and the largest ships could go to sea at neap tides. Two parts of the harbour were then remarkably deep; the one called _Fieln’s Road_, at the end of the west channel; and the other _Ferrier’s Road_, at the end of the east channel; and both of them three and half fathoms at low water. The tides too were then so strong as to make it necessary to use stream cables to moor the ships. _Guybon Goddard_, Esq. a former Recorder of Lynn (and brother in law to Sir Wm. Dugdale) who died about 1677, says, that at the World’s End in the Harbour of Lynn, there was not in any man’s remembrance less than ten or eleven feet at low water; and at a place called the _Mayor’s Fleet_ 8 or 9 feet. The channel to seaward, below the haven, he says, near half mile wide at low water, was yet of a depth sufficient for a Ship of 12 foot water to be brought up in any one tide without wind. {26a} Upon the whole, it appears that the state of Lynn Harbour, and of the rivers which discharge themselves that way, was before the erection of the Sluices much superior to what it has been since. {26b}