Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722Defoe, Daniel
History
Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722
Defoe, Daniel
England -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800
As I said, I first had a view of Cambridge from Gogmagog hills; I am to
add that there appears on the mountain that goes by this name, an ancient
camp or fortification, that lies on the top of the hill, with a double,
or rather treble, rampart and ditch, which most of our writers say was
neither Roman nor Saxon, but British. I am to add that King James II.
caused a spacious stable to be built in the area of this camp for his
running homes, and made old Mr. Frampton, whom I mentioned above, master
or inspector of them. The stables remain still there, though they are
not often made use of. As we descended westward we saw the Fen country
on our right, almost all covered with water like a sea, the Michaelmas
rains having been very great that year, they had sent down great floods
of water from the upland countries, and those fens being, as may be very
properly said, the sink of no less than thirteen counties—that is to say,
that all the water, or most part of the water, of thirteen counties falls
into them; they are often thus overflowed. The rivers which thus empty
themselves into these fens, and which thus carry off the water, are the
Cam or Grant, the Great Ouse and Little Ouse, the Nene, the Welland, and
the river which runs from Bury to Milden Hall. The counties which these
rivers drain, as above, are as follows:—
Lincoln, Warwick, Norfolk,
* Cambridge, Oxford, Suffolk,
* Huntingdon, Leicester, Essex,
* Bedford, * Northampton
Buckingham, * Rutland.
Those marked with (*) empty all their waters this way, the rest but in
part.
In a word, all the water of the middle part of England which does not run
into the Thames or the Trent, comes down into these fens.
In these fens are abundance of those admirable pieces of art called
decoys that is to say, places so adapted for the harbour and shelter of
wild fowl, and then furnished with a breed of those they call decoy
ducks, who are taught to allure and entice their kind to the places they
belong to, that it is incredible what quantities of wild fowl of all
sorts, duck, mallard, teal, widgeon, &c., they take in those decoys every
week during the season; it may, indeed, be guessed at a little by this,
that there is a decoy not far from Ely which pays to the landlord, Sir
Thomas Hare, £500 a year rent, besides the charge of maintaining a great
number of servants for the management; and from which decoy alone, they
assured me at St. Ives (a town on the Ouse, where the fowl they took was
always brought to be sent to London) that they generally sent up three
thousand couple a week.
There are more of these about Peterborough, who send the fowl up twice a
week in waggon-loads at a time, whose waggons before the late Act of
Parliament to regulate carriers I have seen drawn by ten and twelve
horses a-piece, they were laden so heavy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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