Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/24



At the outset the reader must identify himself so far with the people of Lincolnshire as to make himself at home in the universally accepted meanings of certain words and expressions which he will hear constantly recurring. He will soon come to know that 'siver' means however, that 'slaäpe' means slippery, that 'unheppen,' a fine old word (—unhelpen), means awkward, that 'owry' or 'howry' means dirty; but, having learnt this, he must not conclude that the word 'strange' in 'straänge an' owry weather' means anything unfamiliar. 'Straänge'—perhaps the commonest adverbial epithet in general use in Lincolnshire—e.g. "you've bin a straänge long while coming" only means very. But besides common conversational expressions he will have to note that the well-known substantives 'Marsh' and 'Fen' bear in Lincolnshire a special meaning, neither of them now denoting bog or wet impassable places. The Fens are the rich flat corn lands, once perpetually flooded, but now drained and tilled; the divisions between field and field being mostly ditches, small or big, and all full of water; the soil is deep vegetable mould, fine, and free from stones, hardly to be excelled for both corn and roots; while the Marsh is nearly all pasture land, stiffer in nature, and producing such rich grass that the beasts can grow fat upon it without other food. Here, too, the fields are divided by ditches or "dykes" and the sea wind blows over them with untiring energy, for the Marsh is all next the coast, being a belt averaging seven or eight miles in width, and reaching from the Wash to the Humber.

From this belt the Romans, by means of a long embankment, excluded the waters of the sea; and Nature's sand-dunes, aided by the works of man in places, keep up the Roman tradition. Even before the Roman bank was made, the Marsh differed from the Fen, in that the waters which used to cover the fens were fed by the river floods and the waters from the hills, and it was not, except occasionally and along the course of a tidal river, liable to inundation from the sea; whereas the Marsh was its natural prey. Of course both Marsh and Fen are all level. But the third portion of the county is of quite a different character, and immediately you get into it all the usual ideas about Lincolnshire being a flat, ugly county vanish, and as this upland country extends over most of the northern half of the county, viz., from Spilsby to the Humber on the