the sea-country of Mehalah . by J Wentworth Day . Mehalah Baker ! I know&apos;d she well , poor gal . we went to dame &apos;s school together - three halfpence a week to learn reading , writing and &apos;rithmetic . she lived across the creek on Ray Island , with her old mother , who was forever drunk on gin . you could get a masterful lot of gin then for tuppence . poor Mehalah - she had a sad life on &apos;t . &apos;course , the Raverand over at East wrote a book about her . that was all the go that time o&apos; day . everybody was a-readin&apos; o&apos; it . the Raverand was a tall , thin man . used to walk about the marsh roads , singin&apos; in the wind . he was a rare scholard , a right larned man . 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 . 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 . today it is a collector &apos;s piece . it sent shudders down the delicate spines of our grandmothers . Mrs Pullen was over eighty when she died , thirty years ago . 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 . 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 . Baring-Gould &apos;s story of Mehalah is high-pitched , grim , melodramatic , removed to the end of the 18th century for romantic effect . redeemed by exquisite word-pictures of the marshes and true-life portraits of marshland characters , it has been reprinted eighteen times . briefly , the Mehalah Sharland of the melodrama is wooed by Elijah Rebow , a marsh farmer , brutal , cunning , ferocious . he owns the Ray and lives in Red Hall . Mehalah , vivid , raven-haired and gipsy-fierce , hates him . her heart is set on George De Witt , a young fisherman . 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 . in despair she marries him , swearing never to consummate the marriage . on her wedding night , Mehalah hits Rebow with a bottle . it contains vitriol and blinds him . stunned by remorse , she swears to look after him for the rest of her life . her old admirer , George De Witt , returns from the navy ; but it is too late . he announces that he will marry her rival , Phoebe Musset , and Mehalah realizes that Rebow alone is constant . later , in a passion the blind man knocks her senseless , lifts her into his boat , rows out to sea and pulls out the boat &apos;s plug . the pair , their marriage unconsummated , drown together . despite this barn-storming quality , the book grips you . those who remember , as I do , the fanatical , biblical frenzy of marshland religious beliefs and family feuds , glimpse flashes of truth . there are still De Witts , Mussets , Petticans , Pudneys and others in the marsh villages . and Rebow is a remembered name . the melodrama , however , as told by Baring-Gould is , I believe , pure fantasy , apart from the use of local place-names and surnames . 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 . salt tides still gurgle in crab-holes . the ebb bares the shining mud-flats . lonely creeks are opal in the dawn , sword-blue in the sun , greyly silver under misty moons . curlew whistle haunting music . redshank ring their million bells in the courting days of spring . 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 &apos; Green , mocking the living about to join them . 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 . the tides ebb out for a mile or more . if you are lost in a duck-punt in a winter fog , as I have been , sea and land melt into grey , terrifying nothingness . 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 . a country of high skies and incredibly clear lights , of drifting sea-fogs and sharp tides . 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 . 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 . great farmhouses , built when the armada was a boding threat , stand within moats starred by water-lilies , sentinelled by cloudy elms . they and their villages bear names that echo Saxon and Roman , Dane and Norman . most of them lie at the head of lonely creeks . 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 . 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 . there is such an old green road from the off-buildings at Decoy Farm on Bohun &apos;s Hall at Tollesbury to Thurslet Creek , which maps show as Thistly Creek , a name not used locally . across the fields lie Tolleshunt D&apos;Arcy Hall and Bourchier &apos;s Hall ; the first within a perfect moat , the second with fragments of a homestead moat . within a gunshot of Bourchier &apos;s Hall stand the mournful remains of Guisnes Court , built from the old stones of London Bridge . those four house names preserve manorial memories . it was Baron Bohun who , with Bigod , threw the threats of Edward 1 in his face with the words : by God , Sir King , we will neither go nor hang . Tolleshunt D&apos;Arcy derives from the D&apos;Arcys who held half this wild marsh country in feudal fee . Baldwin , Earl of Guisnes , held a knight &apos;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 . Robert , Lord Bourchier , kept his first court at Bourchier &apos;s Hall in 1329 . 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 : all are Norman . Fingringhoe , Langenhoe and Wivenhoe smell of the Viking . the gaunt grey priory of St Osyth , across the Colne to the east of Brightlingsea , is dedicated to a forgotten Saxon saint . all this coast is vivid with history . 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 . it was garrisoned by the Count of the Saxon shore . there , in A.D 653 , Cedd , Bishop of the east Saxons , built from the Roman ruins St Peter &apos;s Chapel , the little cathedral which stands , earth-floored , wind-beaten , on a slight rise at the end of the sea-wall . it is fifty-five feet long and twenty-six feet wide , barely large enough to hold a couple of dozen worshippers . hundreds of pilgrims visit it each year and camp in army huts on the near-by marsh . Elizabethan seamen used it as a beacon tower whose flames flickered at night far over the treacherous sea-flats . Georgian smugglers stored their barrels in it . in the first world war , troops used it as a look-out . today , it is reconsecrated , a place of God . 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 . 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 . there he reared his family of six and fed them with the spoils of punt-gun and peter-net , eel-spear and rabbit-snare . 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 . they say it has killed fifty thousand wild geese and wild duck in the last hundred years . the wild geese are protected now ; and in winter the marshes and bitter mud-flats of Mehalah &apos;s country are haunted at dawn and dusk by long wavering skeins of the great birds like windblown witches . the Romans built not only the fort of Othona : they had a pharos , or lighthouse , on Mersea . they laid the foundations of the Strood , the causeway which connects the island with the mainland . they went to Mersea for oysters . they sent their sick there to recover . they built a temple to Vesta on the site of West Mersea church . 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 . Salcott-cum-Virley is still a village ; across the creek is the ghost of the vanished village of Virley . the Sun Inn , immortalized in Mehalah , stands in the village street , as yet , thank God , unmodernized . 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 . 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 . the nots in the Decalogue had been erased by a village humourist ; a wormeaten deal table did duty for an altar ; the curate &apos;s red cotton handkerchief was the only altar-cloth . the floor of the chancel was eaten through by rats ; the bones beneath were exposed to view . the congregation consisted chiefly of a few young folk , who snored sonorously , or cracked nuts , or adorned the pews with rude sketches of ships . on the wedding-day a motley crowd assembled to see the fun , and the tiny church was crowded . 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 . pen and ink were , with difficulty , found ; while the sight-seers exchanged uncomplimentary sentences aloud in the presence of the Reverend Mr Rabbit . the bridegroom was arrayed in a blue coat with brass buttons and knee-breeches ; 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 hat , tied with ribbons of sky blue ; in her frizzled hair was a bunch of forget-me-nots . 