THE WEIRDEST SPOT IN BRITAIN.

Otago Witness, Issue 2258, 10 June 1897, Page 46

THE WEIRDEST SPOT IN BRITAIN.

I. THE BLACKWATER ESTUARY. The inhabitants, born and bred there, do not know that it is one of the queerest places in the world. They look upon it merely as earth, water, and sky. But neither does it occur to the hunters of Labrador nor the navigators of Dalagoa Bay that there is anything strange about their marvellous countries. Between 40 and 50 miles from Charing Cross lie the vast salt marshes and tide banks that rim East Essex with a grey baud of ooze. For miles a strayed wanderer may stare round the horizon over the limitless wastes of swamp and sea, his eyes aching for a reatful hillock or mound, and wonder if it can be part of the country he was bred in. Halving the desolate swamps swirls the great shining Blackwater, a mighty volume of grey sea three miles wide, that runs oceanward at low water, and bares on each side a deep fringe of weed-hung ooze, like the toothless gums of a centenarian. A month ago I stood on the southerly point of this water giant and looked over the emptiness of desolate salt marsh, and the boiling, eddying tide that surged heavily eastwards, stranding the green sea wrack in long fields of Bcummy weed. There was desolation, and space — endless space ; but oceans of glorious colour and a beauty that is more real than any in the purple mountains or dreamy cornlands. There were men hero and there on the scene. Scattered .fishermen and fowlers wring a living by hard toil from the grim old river, and away on THS VAST OOZE BANKS THAT JTEINGEB TIIE TIDE I conld see the tiny black dots crawling slowly over the mud. These wera wreckage hunters and gatherers of the black shellfish that haunt the inner weed. Each man was dressed in a tough blue jersey and mighty sea boots, and a large flat board strapped to each foot kept him from sinking in the treacherous marsh. It is a dismal death that lurks in the great cea swamp, and the man who, not knowing* the waya of the Blackwater, ventures on her slimy flats without mud boards 13 doomed if he strikes into the mellow banks, which shine so softly in the winter sun, acd are called the Green Death. Foot by foot the shaking swamp sucks him into its sticky grip, and calls for help count for very little in that lonely waste. Strangers have been trapped by the patient old river, and dragged down, shrieking, till the clammy ooze closed over their head. But the shellfish gatherers learn from their forefathers that which the stranger learns when it is time to die, and they keep from the grip of the mud. Slowly there slid round the brink of the flats a long white punt, pointed like a canoe. The wizened, bearded man in shiny oilskins who sat gloomily in the stern was an eelgpeater — follower o£ another queer industry of the Blackwatar. When the tides are half

low the spearew glide silently through the mazy creeks, thrusting rapidly at the mad below the shallow water with a three-pronged epear, like Eskimos at a seal's blowhole, now and again bringing up a writhing eel transfixed on one of the prongs. Sieca daybreak this frost-scarred seatoiler had lanced at the shallow oreek water, and a load of seething black crawlers lay heaped under his forepeak. He lowered darkly at me as he passed, for THE GRIM SWAMP LIFE OF THESE BEARDED WORKERS often preya on their nature, and m renders them surly and listless. Yet there are many who arc cheery and even-tempered as one could wish. They are the offspring of the atom old Saxon settlers and Danish pirates that swept the gloomy seas -when Essex was young. The tide was out by this time, and the flats shone up in all their black loneliness, some bald of any growth, and others carpsted with a tangled ecalp of sea grass. All the whistling, piping water birds that haunt the salt marshes had split up their armies and scattered over the swamp, but from the hem of tbe sobbing tide rarg tho long, wild scream of long-beaked curlew — the shyeat of all birds. Redshanks mounded their tinkling notes on the higher mud ; great changeful clouds, of oxbirds — tbe little white-bellied seasnipe of- the ooze — flashed along the shores, and down by the tooth of a s pit of green marsh a team of wild duok pitched noisily, and paddled hard against the currents. There were companies of widgeon, too, on the wing, and far out to seaward the eaßlsrly drift breeze bore up the wild bark of the black geese that eit on the main flats, and defy man and his methods. The hordes of fowl that throng the Blackwater have given cause, ainca the beginning of time, to another wild livelihood of the Essex sea swamps — the lonely work of the fowler. There is only one means of killing the shy duck and geese tribes that ewim these grey waters, and that is by virtue of the long white gunning punt, with a great gun of heavy power, and a length of seven or eight feet. The ordinary shoulder gun cannot cope with wild fowl on sea water — a peashooter is as useful. But after long use and practice the punt gunner, with his mighty weapon fixed in the j bow* of his frai} craft, can sometimes work ; near enough to the chattering companies to rake their lines. It is by far the most arduous and difficult of all the uses to which a gun may be put, and also the most fascinating. There are many punt gunners on the Blackwater, but their calling is not what it was. It is only with endless toil IN THE BITTEREST DAYS OF WINTER that a gunner can support himself. Yet no man who has lived by punt gunning can leave it, for it offers the strongest excitement and the utmost craft and skill known in tbe hunting of wild things. On the southern shore, near the sea, nestled the tiny village called Bradwell, peopled by a spattering of tanned fishermen and a body of cheery coastgaardsmen that defend the land line from that which is against the law of contraband. A grey creek ran opposite the village, fronted by a long, low spit of salt marsh that bsars the name ! of Pewit Island. | There lay a dull-sided coal barge unloading in the swirling creekway, and a few white gunning punts stranded on the bare ooze. It it a village of the Blackwater and no other. You will not find its twin anywhere but on the Essex coast. There is no railway for miles, nor any coach connecting it with the wakeful world outside.