The Sea-Country of Mehalah .sx by J. WENTWORTH DAY .sx 'MEHALAH BAKER !sx I know'd she well , poor gal .sx We went to dame's school together- three halfpence a week to learn reading , writing and 'rithmetic .sx She lived across the creek on Ray Island , with her old mother , who was forever drunk on gin .sx You could get a masterful lot of gin then for tuppence .sx Poor Mehalah- she had a sad life on't .sx 'Course , the Raverand over at East wrote a book about her .sx That was all the go that time o' day .sx Everybody was a-readin' o' it .sx The Raverand was a tall , thin man .sx Used to walk about the marsh roads , singin' in the wind .sx He was a rare scholard , a right larned man .sx ' Thus spoke my revered , and now , alas , dead , friend , Mrs Jane Pullen , landlady of that very old , sun-warmed inn , the Peldon Rose , which crouches in its willows on the Essex shore , cocking a wary eye across the water at the independent isle of Mersea .sx For fifty years she was landlady of this ancient inn , which the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould , that master of Victorian melodrama , immortalized in Mehalah , A Story of the Salt Marshes , first published in 1880 .sx Today it is a collector's piece .sx It sent shudders down the delicate spines of our grandmothers .sx Mrs Pullen was over eighty when she died , thirty years ago .sx That helps to date Mehalah Baker , the pathetic girl of the Essex marshes who lived in a small farmhouse built of wreckage timber and roofed with red pantiles , on Ray Island .sx You may still trace the foundations among wind-twisted thorn trees on that lonely little isle of saltings and coarse grass , between the shifting tides of the twin creeks , Ray Channel and Strood Channel , which cut off the bold , bright men of Mersea from the duller chaps over in England .sx Baring-Gould's story of Mehalah is high-pitched , grim , melodramatic , removed to the end of the 18th century for romantic effect .sx Redeemed by exquisite word-pictures of the marshes and true-life portraits of marshland characters , it has been reprinted eighteen times .sx Briefly , the Mehalah Sharland of the melodrama is wooed by Elijah Rebow , a marsh farmer , brutal , cunning , ferocious .sx He owns the Ray and lives in Red Hall .sx Mehalah , vivid , raven-haired and gipsy-fierce , hates him .sx Her heart is set on George De Witt , a young fisherman .sx Rebow , in revenge , supplies her mother with secret kegs of smuggled rum , steals their sheep , betrays De Witt to the press gang , and finally sets fire to the Ray farmhouse and takes the now penniless girl and her almost senile mother to live at Red Hall .sx In despair she marries him , swearing never to consummate the marriage .sx On her wedding night , Mehalah hits Rebow with a bottle .sx It contains vitriol and blinds him .sx Stunned by remorse , she swears to look after him for the rest of her life .sx Her old admirer , George De Witt , returns from the navy ; but it is too late .sx He announces that he will marry her rival , Phoebe Musset , and Mehalah realizes that Rebow alone is constant .sx Later , in a passion the blind man knocks her senseless , lifts her into his boat , rows out to sea and pulls out the boat's plug .sx The pair , their marriage unconsummated , drown together .sx Despite this barn-storming quality , the book grips you .sx Those who remember , as I do , the fanatical , biblical frenzy of marshland religious beliefs and family feuds , glimpse flashes of truth .sx There are still De Witts , Mussets , Petticans , Pudneys and others in the marsh villages .sx And Rebow is a remembered name .sx The melodrama , however , as told by Baring-Gould is , I believe , pure fantasy , apart from the use of local place-names and surnames .sx Except for the seaward side of Mersea Island which is ruined by a sprawl of suburban bungalows , utterly alien to the island tradition of building , this fascinating half-land of sea-creeks and salt marshes is much as Mehalah knew it .sx Salt tides still gurgle in crab-holes .sx The ebb bares the shining mud-flats .sx Lonely creeks are opal in the dawn , sword-blue in the sun , greyly silver under misty moons .sx Curlew whistle haunting music .sx Redshank ring their million bells in the courting days of spring .sx At night , bar-geese laugh their ghastly laughter far out on the crawling tide- the ghosts , they say , of drowned sailors , down in the green alleys of Fiddlers' Green , mocking the living about to join them .sx In winter the brent geese come south over bitter seas from Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya to winter on Dengie Flats , where the sea-wall , houseless , manless , goes marching down the coast for a dozen lonely miles .sx The tides ebb out for a mile or more .sx If you are lost in a duck-punt in a winter fog , as I have been , sea and land melt into grey , terrifying nothingness .sx You can only tell the direction of the land when the tide has ebbed by the lie of seaweed and eel-grass on the mud .sx A country of high skies and incredibly clear lights , of drifting sea-fogs and sharp tides .sx An old , old land of beauty and mystery haunted by Roman and Dane , East Saxon and Norman , and by all that rough crew of smugglers and wreckers , wildfowlers and fishermen , poachers and marsh-men whose immemorial kingdom it is .sx Landward , miles of rough grass marshes , cattle-dotted , seamed by reedy 'fleets' where wild duck nest and reed-warblers chitter in the reeds , melt into low uplands , bright with corn .sx Great farmhouses , built when the Armada was a boding threat , stand within moats starred by water-lilies , sentinelled by cloudy elms .sx They and their villages bear names that echo Saxon and Roman , Dane and Norman .sx Most of them lie at the head of lonely creeks .sx In the old days sprit-sailed barges glided , red-sailed , above the land to village hithes with cattle and corn , coals and wood , or stacked high with hay .sx The old green 'barge roads' , raised causeways of grass , still run from many a farmyard to forgotten havens where weed-grown posts stand memorial to the rough seaman who tied up there .sx There is such an old green road from the off-buildings at Decoy Farm on Bohun's Hall at Tollesbury to Thurslet Creek , which maps show as Thistly Creek , a name not used locally .sx Across the fields lie Tolleshunt D'Arcy Hall and Bourchier's Hall ; the first within a perfect moat , the second with fragments of a homestead moat .sx Within a gunshot of Bourchier's Hall stand the mournful remains of Guisnes Court , built from the old stones of London Bridge .sx Those four house names preserve manorial memories .sx It was Baron Bohun who , with Bigod , threw the threats of Edward =1 in his face with the words :sx 'By God , Sir King , we will neither go nor hang .sx ' Tolleshunt D'Arcy derives from the D'Arcys who held half this wild marsh country in feudal fee .sx Baldwin , Earl of Guisnes , held a knight's fee of the Honour of Boulogne in Tollesbury in the reign of King John , which passed later to Robert Bourchier , Lord Chancellor of England and Earl of Essex .sx Robert , Lord Bourchier , kept his first court at Bourchier's Hall in 1329 .sx For the rest of these echoes of history , there lie , scattered under wide marsh skies , manors and villages which sing on the tongue- Salcott-cum-Virley , Bradwell-juxta-Mare , Tolleshunt Knights , Layer Breton , Layer-de-la-Haye :sx all are Norman .sx Fingringhoe , Langenhoe and Wivenhoe smell of the Viking .sx The gaunt grey priory of St. Osyth , across the Colne to the east of Brightlingsea , is dedicated to a forgotten Saxon saint .sx All this coast is vivid with history .sx A mile east of Bradwell , at the end of the straight Roman road which leads through wheat and barley to the sea , you will find remnants of the twelve-foot-thick walls of the old Roman fort of Othona , built to guard the mouth of the Blackwater in the reign of Diocletian or Constantine =1 .sx It was garrisoned by the Count of the Saxon Shore .sx There , in A.D. 653 , Cedd , Bishop of the East Saxons , built from the Roman ruins St. Peter's Chapel , the little cathedral which stands , earth-floored , wind-beaten , on a slight rise at the end of the sea-wall .sx It is fifty-five feet long and twenty-six feet wide , barely large enough to hold a couple of dozen worshippers .sx Hundreds of pilgrims visit it each year and camp in army huts on the near-by marsh .sx Elizabethan seamen used it as a beacon tower whose flames flickered at night far over the treacherous sea-flats .sx Georgian smugglers stored their barrels in it .sx In the First World War , troops used it as a look-out .sx Today , it is reconsecrated , a place of God .sx The only dead man to lie in state , during the last century or more , within those lonely walls on the edge of the crawling sea was my gallant old friend Walter Linnett , 'the last of the Essex fowlers' , who died only a year or two ago .sx He lived his long life in the one-storeyed , three-roomed wooden coastguard cottage which crouches , bowered in vines , on the seaward side of the sea-wall at the foot of the old Roman fort .sx There he reared his family of six and fed them with the spoils of punt-gun and peter-net , eel-spear and rabbit-snare .sx His great punt-gun , ten feet long , two-and-a-half inches in bore , three hundred pounds in weight , capable of firing two pounds of swan shot , now stands in my hall .sx They say it has killed fifty thousand wild geese and wild duck in the last hundred years .sx The wild geese are protected now ; and in winter the marshes and bitter mud-flats of Mehalah's country are haunted at dawn and dusk by long wavering skeins of the great birds like windblown witches .sx The Romans built not only the fort of Othona :sx they had a pharos , or lighthouse , on Mersea .sx They laid the foundations of the Strood , the causeway which connects the island with the mainland .sx They went to Mersea for oysters .sx They sent their sick there to recover .sx They built a temple to Vesta on the site of West Mersea church .sx When I had the shooting on Fingringhoe Wick at the mouth of the River Colne , a lonely peninsula of sandy gravel and saltings , we found the complete foundations of a Roman villa with a mass of oyster shells .sx Salcott-cum-Virley is still a village ; across the creek is the ghost of the vanished village of Virley .sx The Sun Inn , immortalized in Mehalah , stands in the village street , as yet , thank God , unmodernized .sx But Virley Church , where Mehalah was married to the brutal Elijah Rebow by the Reverend Mr Rabbit , is a ruin , whilst the near-by White Hart Inn , once a den of smugglers , was blotted out by a bomb in the last war .sx The picture of that tragic wedding , as re-told by Herbert Tompkins in his Marsh Country Rambles , is a pathetic commentary on the rough marsh-life of the day .sx The " nots " in the Decalogue had been erased by a village humourist ; a wormeaten deal table did duty for an altar ; the curate's red cotton handkerchief was the only altar-cloth .sx The floor of the chancel was eaten through by rats ; the bones beneath were exposed to view .sx The congregation consisted chiefly of a few young folk , who snored sonorously , or cracked nuts , or adorned the pews with rude sketches of ships .sx On the wedding-day a motley crowd assembled to see the fun , and the tiny church was crowded .sx In the west gallery boys dropped broken tobacco-pipes on the heads of the persons below ; a sweep , unwashed , pushed forward and took a seat beside the altar ; the Communion-rails were broken down and the chancel filled with a noisy squabbling mob .sx Pen and ink were , with difficulty , found ; while the sight-seers exchanged uncomplimentary sentences aloud in the presence of the Reverend Mr Rabbit .sx The bridegroom was arrayed in a " blue coat with brass buttons and " ; old Mrs De Witt , a queer character , had thrown a smart red coat over her silk dress ; on her head was a " broad white chip " , tied with ribbons of sky blue ; in her frizzled hair was a bunch of forget-me-nots .sx