Darkness was beginning to threaten before we left Colchester for Ipswich, and it had fallen before Ipswich was reached by the same road used in leaving it heretofore. So we passed through the streets of Ipswich, still crooked, of course, still infested with giant tramcars, and still crowded, into the open country beyond, the light of the acetylene lamps piercing the gloom for fully a quarter of a mile ahead. We pushed on partly because our minds had been half made up to spend the night at Felixstowe, partly because, on the whole, it seemed that Felixstowe would be a more pleasant resting-place than Ipswich. The drawback was that we saw nothing more of the country than that, apparently, we crossed a good deal of heathland, and that at Trimley the towers of two churches appeared in quick succession. They were in fact in the same churchyard, as was seen another day, and one was and is Trimley St. Mary and the other Trimley St. Martin. Why they stand cheek by jowl in this wasteful fashion I am unhappily not able to say, not for lack of inquiry or curiosity, but because inquiry has not been addressed to the right authorities and curiosity has therefore been vain. Of Felixstowe that night we saw nothing much. We gathered an impression of streets of new villas, detached and semi-detached, leading at last to a large hotel which, albeit in a state of semi-hibernation, was welcome. Semi-hibernation means that the dining-room proper was not in use, and that only the first floor bedrooms were ready for the reception of visitors. Still, there was dinner ready, and its readiness quite made up for cramped quarters. Need it be added that the hotel is named after Felix the Burgundian, as is the town? Felix, every schoolboy knows, but a good many grown men and women may have forgotten, was the first Bishop of East Anglia, imported by King Sigeberht in 630 a.d., and had his see at Dunwich, perhaps the most weirdly forlorn place in all England, which we visited next day.
That next day opened ill, with abundance of warm rain which, at first at any rate, showed no signs of abating. That rain was really a blessing in disguise, for when it abated sullenly, Mr. Coleman proposed a morning call on Mr. Felix Cobbold, m.p., whom in fact he had been helping in the election, which ought to be known for all time as the motor-car election, and Mr. Cobbold was hospitality personified. He kept us willing prisoners, taking us with him as hostages while he went in search of the ladies, and hence comes it that, without stepping outside my rule never to inspect another man's house save as his guest, I can at least attempt to describe a very perfect gem of an earthly paradise. You must know first that Felixstowe is fitly, one must not write "happily," named, in that, being situate on the east coast of England, where the air has been known to exceed its duties in the way of bracing the constitution of man, it has a little aspect of its own nearly due south. Along the front of this for some distance runs a parade, esplanade, promenade, or whatsoever they may choose to call it, and from this, unless memory is playing a trick, the usual pier of the modern watering-place runs into the sea in the usual way. It would appear then that Felixstowe itself made no abiding impression, exercised no strong fascination, on my mind. That is so. It is just a seaside town, with lots of new houses, which lays itself out to attract sojourning visitors in summer, and such places differ little. Some, Clacton-on-Sea for example, which is also within my manor, are a little worse than others by reason of the multitudes and quality of the company; some are a little better, and have golf-links. Felixstowe is of the latter kind, and the golf-links, which we saw next day, look distinctly good. But for seaside places, as such, I have frankly no use, and it is the rarest thing in the world for them to be possessed of any architectural interest.
Such were the feelings with which I walked with Mr. Coleman, having first seen that the car was feeling well, to the end of the sea-walk, whatsoever its proper title may be. Edward Fitzgerald, I felt, would not visit Felixstowe now if he were still in the flesh, and the author of "Murray" would not recognize "the pleasant village of Felixstowe, frequented in summer by a few visitors for sea-bathing," and apparently accessible only by coach from Ipswich even in 1875. At the east end of the walk we reached a barrier of oak palings, delightfully weathered, and in the palings in due course a gate, which led us to the haven where we would be. Imagine a long escarpment of land, facing the midday sun and the sea, and raised above the sea some forty or fifty feet. On it stands a long, many-windowed house with spacious verandas, from which, as from the windows, man may look down on the vast highway of the sea, sometimes smooth, sometimes grandly rough, and at the wayfarers upon it. He may enjoy all the advantages of being at sea without what some regard as its disadvantages, may look at the regular sailings of the Harwich boats, may speculate upon the destination of this or that "tramp" of the ocean. Between him and the sea are terraced walks, wonders in the way of rock and wall-gardens, glorious with plants which revel in the soft sea air and will live in no other. Away to the right, on the slope towards Felixstowe, is a sheltered yet sunny rose-garden, and above it a glorious pergola of the substantial kind beloved of Miss Jekyll. Off to the left, past tamarisks and fuchsias, is a cunning mixture of trees and grass and flower-borders, of sheltered rock-gardens and ingenious intricacies of light and shade, with glasshouses far away, not obtruding themselves on the eye, but glorious when entered. To a garden lover there could be no more unalloyed pleasure than a tour round the outside of this house, especially under the guidance of the owner and maker of the garden, who possesses not merely learning, but also that sympathy with plants which is of more value than all the horticultural books ever written by man or woman.
Of the inside of the house it is not fitting to speak in detail. Suffice it to say that it is, in every respect, the fitting environment of a man of advanced middle age, sometime scholar of Eton, still a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, much travelled, able to indulge a refined and catholic taste in literature and art, of whose inner life books, pictures and plants are the most familiar friends. But surely something may be written of the great walled garden, behind all this and across the public road. It is emphatically the most perfect "kitchen" garden I have ever seen, and on this particular I may almost venture to claim to speak with some authority—the authority, that is to say, which belongs to one who is a natural lover of gardens, even of those which are useful, and who has had the good fortune to see many of the finest gardens in England. How great the space is 'tis hard to guess; it is ample. It is girt on all sides by high brick walls, and these walls, although by no means ancient, have already taken a glorious colour. Against them is trained all manner of wall-fruit, the best aspects being chosen, of course, for the apricots, the peaches and the nectarines, which delight to "drink the splendour of the sun." The spacious area within the walls is divided into four parts by pergolas converging upon a central circle of green turf. Those pergolas, covering a wide avenue, are delightfully solid, their pillars united at the top by stout timbers of cambered oak, sound enough to stand for centuries. The life they support is that of cordon apples and pears, set close together, and trained to absolute perfection. Both when the blossom is out, especially when the pink of apple-blossom is at its best in May, and when the fruit, ruddy, russet and golden, has taken its colour from the sun, these pergolas must be a sight simply lovely. The central oasis of green has, if memory serves accurately, a fountain in its midst, and round it certainly are pillars clad with rambling roses, their tops united not, as is customary, by drooping chains, but by stout hawsers, two inches or more in diameter, for which it is claimed that they suit the roses as supports better than metal, which is subject to rapid changes of temperature and also to electrical influence. This last consideration was new to me, but doubtless it rests on substantial ground, and the whole idea is an illustration of what may be achieved in gardening by sympathy, which we can all try to give—and by an expenditure which men of moderate means may well shudder to contemplate.
To round off the picture of this ideal home by the sea, be it added that Mr. Cobbold farms, and that his dairy cattle are of the gentle Channel Islands breeds, some Jerseys, all of ascertained pedigree, to which a little Guernsey blood has been added. At Norwich, seeing the Red Polls in great numbers, I ventured an expression of opinion that, on the whole, the native breed of a district is usually "most in the picture" and most profitable in that district, and the opinion remains unshaken, so far as wayside pastures and the ordinary stock on farms are concerned. But for the home farm no cattle are so pleasing to the eye, none are so gentle in their manners, and none give such eminently satisfactory milk as the Channel Islands cattle; and Mr. Cobbold's herd is most decidedly a thing in place. In answer to a leading question, based on personal experience, he writes: "One of the bulls (imported) was a Guernsey one; and his progeny are in some instances still to be distinguished by their whitish noses and lighter-coloured shins. This, of course, would make the cows larger; but apart from this, I have noticed a decided tendency in all the pure bred Jerseys to grow larger on our pastures and subject to the conditions they find here." As a matter of fact the same tendency is visible on pastures less favoured than those of Felixstowe.
It may be said that this is not motoring; but it was a glorious episode on a motor tour, and those who pass these modest oak palings on the way to Bawdsey, as we did next day, may like to know how complete is the paradise that is close to them. Still we did go a-motoring that afternoon, on the principle, perhaps, that although true hospitality may have no limits, nature has supplied one, a fairly high one it is true, to the absorbent capacities of the sponge. Our expedition of the afternoon, by this time soft and rainless, was merely half a Sabbath day's journey, from the point of view of the motorist, for there is no revolutionary pursuit of our age to which the Greek author's saying concerning the mutability of the meaning of words is more applicable than it is to motoring. The saying, by the way, is that in revolutionary times the signification of words as applied to things is always changed. A Sabbath day's journey, for example, was to the Hebrew of old seven miles. In the course of that afternoon, merely pour passer le temps, without overstraining ourselves or the car, we travelled at least eighty miles, starting well after three o'clock, taking our afternoon tea at a supremely interesting spot, and returning to the pleasing shelter of the hotel more or less in time for a rather late dinner.
Our policy, after the first few miles, which were to take us through nature's wild garden of Suffolk, was a policy of drifting, determined by circumstances. There is a Greek word αυταρκεια, which exactly describes one of the chief fascinations of the motor-car for those who have the strength of mind—for it is really strength and not weakness—to allow happy chance to determine their course in some measure. It means "sufficiency in oneself," or "independence," and I am emboldened to refer to it because it is much beloved by Plato, and because Plato, I am given to understand, is quite a popular author among the ladies of our day. Here let a suggestion be offered to the learned gentleman who delivers lectures to note-taking ladies on Plato in the sympathetic atmosphere of one of our huge modern hotels. There is nothing like a concrete example for bringing home to the modern mind the truth of these expressions used by the wise men of the old world, and two illustrations of αυταρκεια are offered freely. "Good horse between my knees" was the very embodiment of the feeling of independence before motor-cars were in the land. Subject to sundry risks, not numerous or probable enough to stop a man of courage from setting forth, the mounted man can go pretty much whither his fancy leads him and change his mind as often as he pleases, within certain obvious limits. The motorist is even more happily situated. For the horseman the risks and the limits remain practically unchanged throughout the ages; for the motorist the risks, save those of tire trouble, are always being reduced and the limits are always being extended. There is now practically no limit, save that of his personal choice and his physical endurance, to the distance he may go, and he need never be troubled, as the horseman must be from time to time, by doubts whether his pleasure may not be causing pain to the organism which carries him willingly from place to place. It is of course just conceivable that the metals may feel, but it is not in the least likely that they do. Everybody has heard of mysterious movements inside apparently solid steel—did not Mr. Ruskin speak beautifully of the "anarchy of steel"?—and it is a frequent experience that an engine will seem to grow tired and to require to be driven with consideration for a while, for no apparent reason. But at any rate, even the wildest fancy can hardly picture steel in pain in the same sense as the overdriven horse or the patient ricksha coolie whose short cough is a reminder that the race is short-lived. No, in motoring, so far as the use of the machine is concerned, there can be no inhumanity.
It was in this spirit that we set forth on that soft afternoon, with a half-formed intention of taking tea with friends near Saxmundham and of going no farther on our outward journey. As it happened we went a great deal farther, taking a predetermined course at first along roads clearly marked on every map, and then, having found a new objective, and having ascertained the direction in which it lay, we made for it by such roads as seemed, on the face of them, and without any regard to their quality or surface, most likely to lead towards it. It took a little longer perhaps, but it was interesting; it gave some exercise to the topographical intelligence, and it led us out of the beaten track. The first part of the route was simplicity itself. We simply retraced our tracks from Felixstowe to Trimley of the twin churches along the Ipswich road, and a mile or two beyond. Then we turned at an obtuse angle to the right and found ourselves in what has been called the wild garden of Suffolk, not in any classical work perhaps, but by word of mouth. A wide stretch it was of gorse and heather, with trees here and there, singly and in groups, the greater part of it some eighty or ninety feet above the level of the adjoining North Sea and, roughly speaking, forty feet above that of the plain, ten miles in width or thereabouts, following the coast northwards for ever so many miles from the left bank of the demure and rather dull river Deben. The "garden" was hardly at its best for, whether kissing was out of fashion or not, the gorse was very certainly and completely out of blossom; and of course there was no glory of bracken; but no strong effort of imagination was called for, no very intimate knowledge of wild nature, to perceive that, later in the year, this must be a divinely attractive run. As it was, the memory left is of clear air and wide prospect, of russets and sombre greens, of two villages—their names turn out to be Brightwell and Martlesham—of no particular note, and of a nameless brook, a tributary of the Deben, forded near the former. The surface of the roads, perhaps, left something to be desired by the fastidious, but that is a matter to which experience and intelligent curiosity lead one to pay less and ever less attention. Through such a country, growing a little more disciplined as our route, nearly due north, took us away from the sea and on to higher ground, we passed to Woodbridge, whereof enough has been said before, and through Wickham Market to our old acquaintance Saxmundham, the original objective of this easy-going drive. But, as it happened, my charioteer's friends at whose house we called had also been tempted abroad that afternoon, and it appeared to be considered probable that they had gone to Dunwich. In came αυταρκεια, independence, and the happy thought, Why not go to Dunwich too? A hasty glance at a map showed that if we pushed on along the high road not quite so far as Yoxford, and then began to think of turning eastward, we must in due course find a road leading us to Dunwich. This was really hardly a case of "taking chances," as our American friends have it, for on that desolate coast the dreary remains of Dunwich are the only point between Southwold and Aldeburgh at which roads converge. Towards Yoxford was some three or four miles through eminently English scenery, undulations of land, which the auctioneer's catalogue would describe not ineptly as "park-like," showing a remarkable succession of well-grown oaks. So "park-like," indeed, was it that, no doubt, much of it was the real thing. As it turned out a general sense of direction suggested the wisdom of bearing to the right, not much more than half-way to Yoxford, and the suggestion was obeyed. It led us by roads no better than farm tracks, and probably never intended to be any better, through Middleton and Westleton, neither of them a village of any note, to a winding road adorned by a sign-post with the legend, "To Dunwich and the Sea." The latter piece of information was not necessary to anybody who had learned to note, by the evidence of the trees, the effects of salt-bearing winds. Wheresoever near any of our coasts you see single trees all sloping in one direction, or coverts almost penthouse-shaped, rising gradually from a puny height of a few feet on one side, to a wall of respectable elevation on the other, there you may be sure that you are quite near to the sea, and that the salt-bearing winds have beaten first on the low side of the covert. So the sign-post was hardly needed on this narrow road of many rectangles, at one of which my charioteer's friends were happily met. A few more turns, a sharp descent under the almost overhanging walls of a long deserted priory, and we were in Dunwich.
This same Dunwich is without exception the most depressing scene on which the eye could rest. Down the hill we swept into a bleak hamlet of some twenty houses and to an inn, where tea was ordered. What time the ladies thawed themselves over a new-lit fire it seemed good to the men to restore circulation, and perhaps stimulate the mind a little, by a tour of inspection, and to ask for guidance beforehand. It was given in grim language. "If you want only to see the ruins you can go by the road; if you want to see the bones you must follow the cliff." So desiring to see everything as quickly as might be, we took the path to the cliff, through a sandy cutting, and soon were close to the evidence of a recent fall into the sea of land, rising perhaps a hundred feet above high-water mark, of which the most reckless speculator would hardly buy the fee simple for any tangible sum. It has been falling—sometimes in large pieces, sometimes in small—since the reign of Edward III; it is falling still, and it will continue to fall. It is of the kind of substance that has no more cohesion, or very little more, than a child's castle of sand, which, having been a broad-based cone in the beginning, has been cut till it opposes a sheer and perpendicular and crumbling obstacle to the advancing tides. Waves and rains—the latter far more destructive than is commonly imagined—are destroying this part of England, even while others are being added to, with remarkable celerity, nor is it easy to see how any protecting works could, even if the enterprise were worth undertaking, be constructed with any reasonable hope of success. The last fall—of part of the churchyard of the derelict All Saint's—was clearly quite recent. The bones, mixed with crumbling débris of the rotten cliff, were being washed by muddy wavelets a hundred feet below the perilous verge of the cliff, a grisly and a saddening sight. The church itself—its west end still standing—hung on the edge of the cliff; it cannot last long. "Murray" writes in 1875: "It might have served till the present day, but was abandoned in the middle of the last century that the townsfolk might sell the bells and lead." He would be a bold man who should say now that the townsfolk were not justly prudent, for it is as plain as a pikestaff that All Saint's is liable at any moment, hurtling down into the insatiable sea, to join St. Peter's and the other five churches, once the glory of Dunwich; it has already sent down half its burial ground, and the rest, although burials continued after the church was abandoned, is sure to follow soon. Opposite my seat of a Sunday in Winchester Cathedral when I was a boy, was a sepulchral chest on top of a screen bearing the legend "In hâc et alterâ e regione cistâ reliquiæ sunt ossium," and then a handful of kings beginning with Canute were mentioned. It used to seem reasonably grim. But this shallow and relentless sea round the last relics of Dunwich, with its bottom strewn by the contents of six churchyards and a half, is to the chest at Winchester as the earthquakes at San Francisco and Valparaiso are to the slipping of an Irish bog. The scene is depressing, unspeakably sad; but it is necessary to visit it in order to realize that Dunwich was once great and to understand its fall, for it is falling still, and it will go on falling; and you cannot help seeing how it all happened.
Hardly anywhere else, perhaps nowhere, is it possible at once to localize and to realize so long and unvarying a story of progressive ruin. Felix, whom we have met before on these wanderings, landed at Dunwich (another legend lands him shipwrecked at Hunstanton) in the seventh century, on his evangelizing mission; doubtless because King Sigeberht of East Anglia prescribed a landing at the principal port of his kingdom. He found there a flourishing community, a port which, for the seventh century, was large, and, says "Murray," remains of a considerable Roman settlement. (But, for reasons already given and of universal application in East Anglia, I am shy of accepting Roman remains unless they be supported by definite and satisfactory evidence.) At any rate the King built himself a palace, and the saint built a church, the cathedral church of the new diocese of East Anglia; and whether both or either used the Roman ruins no man may tell with certainty, for the sea has devoured palace and cathedral church alike. Perhaps, after all, it does not much matter now of what material they were constructed, or what its origin was. Fifteen successive bishops, at any rate, ruled East Anglia ecclesiastically from Dunwich. So early as Domesday there are records of falls; there is even a legend of an extensive forest, flourishing east of the town that way, covering miles of land over which now the "waves wap and the waters wan." Still Dunwich found forty ships for Henry III, and though "rage and surgies of the sea" ravaged it in the time of Edward III, it occurs in a quaint list of East Anglia's contribution to the fleet raised against the Armada, a list which may be given here once and for all:
Colchester, 1 shippe.
Ipswich and Harwich, 2 shippes, 1 pinnace.
Alborough, Orforth, and Dunwich, 1 shippe.
Yearmouth and Leistocke (Lowestoft), 1 shippe, 1 pinnace.
Lynne and Blackney, 2 shippes, 1 pinnace.
In the time of Leland the bitter cry of the people of Dunwich was heard in the land and the legend of the submerged forest of Eastwood is found on his pages: "George Ferras told me that the men of Dunewich desiring Sucour for their Town againe Rages of the Se, adfirme that a great Peace of a Foreste sumtyme therby ys devourid up and turnid to the use of the Se." Who George Ferras was, this deponent knoweth not, but by way of exemplifying the difficulty of reading Leland, it may be mentioned that other places named on the same folio are New-Windelesore (Windsor), Saresbyri (Salisbury), Dovar, to say nothing of Edward III, Egidius, Walterus de la Ville, Nicholas de S. Quintius, and "Mr. Balthazar," all in the space of twenty-five lines of print. Leland's volumes, through no fault of his, as has been pointed out before, are like conglomerate or puddingstone, with here and there a gem, which takes a great deal of finding. Indeed that this particular gem was found may be attributed to fortune. It shows us Dunwich, before the untiring sea had reduced the inhabitants to absolute despair, crying out for help, and crying to deaf ears. Its destruction, in truth, was very gradual, very certain; and, while the nation would not help, it was not worth while for the people to show the indomitable spirit of those in San Francisco to-day, or to set about the task of rebuilding, for in destroying Dunwich the sea wiped out its excuse for existence, making the land that was left unapproachable by reason of its girdle of shallow water. So there is nothing left but memories, a handful of mean houses of no interest by the sea, the ruins of the Grey Friars monastery on the hill, and the church of All Saints tottering on the crumbling verge of the disappearing cliff. How any man or woman can consent to live in this environment of desolation is a thing difficult to understand; but there they are, apparently quite cheerful, a living testimony to the elasticity of human spirits. A stranger, having seen the sights, having mused a little as his eyes wander over that dreary expanse of monotonous sea, leaves Dunwich gladly, without the slightest intention of returning, and convinced that a not very prolonged residence there would assuredly produce melancholia in one not to the manner born.
The opinion has been expressed already that it is not worth while at this time of day, and it would probably be hopeless to endeavour, to cope against the untiring sea in its work of demolishing the glacial cliffs south of Dunwich. As they are demolished they go, by virtue of the southerly drift given to the débris, to alter the coastline southward. Attention has been called, for example, to the childish course pursued by the River Alde. The fault does not lie with the river but with the crumbling cliffs of the north, and they are responsible for closing up the natural mouth it once had at Slaugden, barely half a mile from Aldeburgh. At Southwold and Lowestoft defensive works are praiseworthy, because they are feasible and the land is worth protecting, and this is even more true of the vicinity of Felixstowe. Here much land was lost early in the last century, owing to the fact that huge quantities of stones, forming a natural protection, were removed for manufacture into cement, with the result that the shore was denuded, and the loose pebbles were heaped up by the drift into a totally undesirable shingle bank at Landguard Fort. This bank in its turn threatened Harwich Harbour, and a groyne of concrete had to be set up to arrest its progress. These facts, in detail, came to my knowledge through the Engineer in 1906, together with the somewhat appalling estimate of land lost in East Anglia to the extent of 160 square miles in ten centuries. Land has been gained elsewhere, at Bawdsey, where we shall find ourselves very shortly, for example. At Bawdsey it has been gained through human agency to the advantage of humanity, but on the whole the sea, left to its own devices, works destruction at both ends of its operation. It removes the earth from places where it is needed, as at Dunwich for example, and so wipes one flourishing port out of existence: it does its best to deposit that which it has taken away where it is not needed, and to block up one port with the ruins of another. At Harwich it has, we all hope, been stopped, but all the world knows the mischief which has been wrought south of the estuary of the Thames by the gradual process of accretion converting thriving ports into meaningless inland places. What all the world does not realize, and what our most practised engineers in this kind apprehend, without pretending to comprehend fully, is the unforetellable character of the results that will follow from every attempt to interfere with these mysterious processes of nature which takes the form of opposing an obstacle to the sweep of the tide. Thus to build a groyne or a sea wall, to say to the sea in effect, "Thou hast taken so much, but thou shalt take no more," is hardly likely to produce any injurious result. On the other hand, to stretch a solid pier across the drift, and to divert a current, may be to affect the coast line for hundreds of miles along the coast affected by the drift. As an engineer versed in these matters once said to me, "When you interfere with the tides you must wait for the effect; you cannot predict it."
So back to Felixstowe, varying the cross-country route to the main road a little by following the sense of direction without consulting any maps, and seeing nothing worthy of notice except a belated heron, its long legs stretched behind its slow-flapping wings, making its way from the sea to some distant heronry and croaking sadly as it went, as though to say, "The moon will give no light to-night, so I must perforce go fasting." That is a Welsh version of the heron's melancholy call—please note that the heron always wears half mourning—but the marsh men doubtless express the same thought in some way, for it is sound ornithology, and they know their birds passing well.