Through East Anglia in a Motor CarVincent, James Edmund
General
Through East Anglia in a Motor Car
Vincent, James Edmund
Norfolk (England) -- Description and travel; Suffolk (England) -- Description and travel
ornithologists omit to specify these local names of birds. Hoodie, Danish
crow, Royston crow are identical, and each of them at least as interesting
as _Corone cornix_. They are all, as Mr. Rowdler Sharpe says, ravens in
miniature, but it is open to doubt whether, as pets, they would be equally
amusing in their tricks. We saw them in great numbers as we swept along,
and, like many wild things, they took no notice of the car. It is strictly
irrelevant, of course, but it may be interesting to say that, since these
words were written, I have found that even a Highland stag is not afraid of
a motor-car, which shows a Highland stag to have far more sense than some
reasoning men.
Newmarket we have seen before, and since this time also it was passed
without a halt, whereas on a later visit we stopped for a while, it need
not detain us now. Our road, which kept to the high ground to the
south-east of Mildenhall Fen, took us first through characteristic environs
of Newmarket not seen on the former tour, past endless training grounds,
trim houses and carefully-built stables, and later through the wild heaths
known as Icklingham and Weather Heath, the latter actually 182 feet above
the sea-level. Right well, no doubt, that last-named heath has earned its
name, for it is easy to imagine, and much more comfortable to imagine than
to feel, how a gale from the north or west would have swept across the fens
over that heath. For that matter there is not a single eminence of more
than 200 feet between Weather Heath and the gales from the North Sea, so
the east wind swept it too. Here the hand of man has wrought a great and
beneficial alteration in the features of nature. Mention has been made
before of the belts, clearly planted for partridge driving, to be seen in
some parts of East Anglia, and they must be noticed more particularly a few
miles farther on, when we pass Elvedon. The landowners who planted them,
and the pheasant coverts, have improved the scenery and their own shooting
at the same time. They cannot, perhaps, be credited with absolute and
unalloyed altruism. And soon, on this naturally bleak upland, the road was
sheltered on either side by close hedges of fir, trimmed to a height of ten
feet or so, such as I never saw before, nor have seen since, out of
Norfolk. They cannot be meant for screens to conceal the guns from the
driven birds, for the British public has to stand a good deal of shooting
in illegal proximity to high roads, but it would hardly tolerate permanent
arrangements to that end, even in Norfolk or Suffolk, where game is
sacrosanct. There can be nothing of this kind here, nor, if there were,
would it have been necessary to plant both sides of the road. No--these
hedges, charming because of their quaintness, can have been planted in no
other spirit than that of humanity, in the widest sense of the word. They
break the monotony of the landscape, and that is something; close and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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