THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTY.
COMPARED with Surrey and Kent, Essex is for well-. to-do Londoners an undiscovered county. For ten persons who regularly go south of London—bicyclists, walkers, motorists, or "week-enders" who rent small country houses— only one, perhaps, goes to Essex. Comparatively few go to rfertfordshire ;, but even fterttOrdshire is much more popular than Essei. Of course there are reasons, which lie partly in the character Of the counties themselves, partly in the means of getting there.. To take the second and lesser reason first : the roads out bt. London to the horth are less easy than those to the south.. The road to t mit through gtrattord, Ilford, and Bomford, with its uncomputable miles of bricks and mortar and its unceasing traffic, is enough to make the stoutest traveller quail whether before its ugliness or its inconvenience. And what is true of the road is true of the railway. Stratford, Ilford, and such places are as large as they are because London, following in its growth the line of least resistance, has bulged out in that direction in which the Great Eastern Railway has provided cheap fares, or, in other words, an easy way of escape. Liverpool Street is the station of the working and lower middle classes; it is the station of Clacton-on-Sea and Epping Forest. Those who do not call themselves trippers when they go for a trip, or tourists when they go for a tour, shun it with conscious superiority. You must suffer to reach Essex. But then the other and more important question has to be faced: Is it worth suffering for? The answer to this is almost always "No." It is said that Essex is"dull," "flat," and "ugly "; therefore Surrey is being over- run and overbuilt, while Essex is left untrodden and unspoiled. The present writer has come across Essex villages which for an air of remoteness and unsophistication be could not match in his experience, except in counties so distant as Cornwall and 'Devonshire, and some of those villages lie within fifty miles of London.
We are tempted to celebrate the attractions of Essex, and guarantee that they are worth suffering for, by the republica- tion in a cheap form of a book called "Romantic Essex," by Mr. Reginald A. Beckett (London : J. M. Dent and Co., 2s. net). Mr. Beckett is right when he says that the soul of Essex is its simplicity and its homeliness. Its charms are widely spread. It has no cathedral which gathers up the interest to one point. Yet its houses are an epitome of its history and character ; they look as though they were part of the land- scape, as though they had grown up with the trees, not as though they were set there garishly to attract attention like a staring new villa on a Surrey hillside. Detached houses in Essex—farmhouses and inns—often welcome you with a clean white face, but the complexion of a whole village seen far off is nearly always red, and a thin spire generally tapers above the roofs. Churches and houses alike were built with the materials which were ready to band. There is much timber in the building because Essex has few quarries. In hundreds of churches, too, you may see the relics of the Roman occupation. The Roman bricks are worked into the lower parts of the walls ; flint commonly comes above the brick, and stout timbers are used not only for the roof but in the whole construction. Sometimes the spire is made entirely of wood, and we agree with Mr Beckett that there is something beautiful and touching in the exaltation to this use of the characteristic material of the county. We might add to what be says that no wood was used so often in building as chestnut. When a beam was wanted for a house, or a roof for a church, chestnut was the wood, no doubt
because of the belief that no insect takes kindly to it. The great building age of what is now rural Essex must have come immediately after the suppression of the monasteries, and you can hardly go into an Essex village without finding a Tudor house. If it be a manor-house, it may have a moat or an old monkish fishpond ; and perhaps the pigeon tower, which dates from the times when the lord of the manor had his rights of pigeonry, is still standing. The old inns have a spaciousness which informs you of the well-being of agri- eultural Essex when they were built. Where the land is good there the inns are good also; where the land is poor the inns are built on niggard lines. The heart of the county, which is eut by the main railway, is the great corn district, where even to-day the "tall Essex wheat" waves over many acres. It is said that Essex is not well wooded. Really, parts of it are perfectly wooded, but the marshes naturally are not. A marsh would not have the beauty of a marsh if it were not bare, if it did not invite your attention to its dykes
and coarse grasses; and to the peculiar animal life of flat, moist places, and to the grandeur of the uninterrupted dome
of sky which fits closely round it. But once Essex must have been almost covered by forests, as the existence of Epping, Hainault, and Hatfield Forests attest, and as is proved by the freeuency of such names as South Weald, North Weald, Ilrentwood, Forest Gate, and so forth.
It is said that Essex is flat. Certainly it has no great hills, even as it has no great buildings. But the value of hills is relative. The present writer has often found himself as much impressed by the group of hills which bar the sky to the north of Wiedettnere as by the Alps themselves. Those Lake hills compose themselves majestically, and lead the eye up by beautiful gradations from the water so that the ultimate height is completely satisfying. In the same way you may have a magnificent view from a very low hill, as you indubitably may have none from a high one. Mr. Beckett mentions Laindon Hill, in Essex, from which one can see nearly the whole course of the Thames from the sea to London. The present writer is familiar with the view from another Essex hill which is only fifty feet above the sea, yet be can look without a check over the country for twelve miles in one direction and for fifteen in another, and he desires no better "view" than that of marsh and creek, empty of men and habitation, stretching away to the foot of dim hills. Nor are the hills of the nortlimest corner of Essex so negligible even compared with those of other counties. They are chalk downs, and are part of the same formation as those at Royston and Dunstable. If, as has been said, there are no great buildings in Essex, there is still no town in England with so perfect a Roman wall as that at Colchester. No other town, if it were (let us say) getting up a pageant, could introduce such figures as the mythical Old King Cole, and Cymbeline and Boadicea. Roman, Norman, and Dane can be traced very easily by the names they have left in Essex even where they cannot be traced by their fortifications. The names are extraordinarily attractive. Consider the Saxon Guesting- thorpe, the Norman Layer de in Hays or Tolleshunt D'Arcy, the Danish Thorpe-le-Soken, and then such odd names as Wendens Ambo and Shellow Bowells.
As an example of the out-of-the-worldness of some Essex villages take the piece of country, about twelve miles long, between Ongar and Dunmow. Here are three groups of villages known as the Rodings, the Lavers, and the Easters. It is a cornland traversed by grassy lanes, and no railway is near it. Every village has its windmill near the church. A village sometimes consists simply of church, windmill, and a farm with two or three cottages. You can walk through the lanes for miles without seeing a human being. If there are no great 'houses, there are some " moated granges," nnrepaired perhaps, but at least not restored. The remoteness of a country—in the moral sense, not in the matter of measured miles—may be tested by the number of carriers who take goods and persons from village to village. Essex, then, is indeed "remote," for few counties have so many of those once familiar lumbering and creaking vans. Mr. Beckett says less than we should like about the coast of Essex. It is a frequent remark that the coast is "nothing but mud." But to every one who loves water a broken coast is a beautiful coast. The Essex coast is almost as broken as the West Coast of Scotland. The Crouch, the Blackwater, the Colne, the Stour, break it up with broad estuaries, and detach great fragments from the mainland which are islands when the tide is high. Mud is an ugly word, but the mud of Essex, with its gleaming and varied lights, particularly at sunset, is not ugly at all. There are even some people who prefer low-tide to high-tide. Then the oyster smacks loll idly on their sides, and the great glistening spaces are flecked with white gulls screaming and feeding.
Plovers and curlews with their savage cries, and redshanks with their whistling note, are everywhere on the marshes and saltings. The sheep on these salt places would fetch a high price as "pre sale" in France; but in this simple county of Essex,no one has studied his palate enough to know that a sheep fed on salt food is a particular delicacy, and it goes at the same price as its unsalted fellows. In every creek and estuary you see the brown sails of the Thames barges. These hug the coast inside the great sand- banks, while the steamers smudge the horizon with their smoke much further out to sea. The barges are one of the few remaining schools of sailing; but they are not
better than the oyster-smacks and the "sto boats" which catch sprats. The men who navigate the "Swine," with their strong tides and their fatal shoals, are quick, resourceful, and daring or they perish. When a new British yacht challenges for the America Cup, she will go to Brightlingsea for her crew. No; Essex is not dull, nor fiat, nor ugly ; it has a mellow sweetness of its own, a quaint diversity, and a scarcely injured aspect of antiquity, as Constable and William Morris -very well knew.
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