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After London - Or, Wild England by Richard Jefferies
page 7 of 274 (02%)
the tallest cow-parsnips or "gicks" rose five or six feet high, and the
willow herb with its stout stem, almost as woody as a shrub, filled
every approach.

By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills
only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of
wild creatures or cut himself a path. The ditches, of course, had long
since become full of leaves and dead branches, so that the water which
should have run off down them stagnated, and presently spread out into
the hollow places and by the corner of what had once been fields,
forming marshes where the horsetails, flags, and sedges hid the water.

As no care was taken with the brooks, the hatches upon them gradually
rotted, and the force of the winter rains carried away the weak timbers,
flooding the lower grounds, which became swamps of larger size. The
dams, too, were drilled by water-rats, and the streams percolating
through, slowly increased the size of these tunnels till the structure
burst, and the current swept on and added to the floods below. Mill-dams
stood longer, but, as the ponds silted up, the current flowed round and
even through the mill-houses, which, going by degrees to ruin, were in
some cases undermined till they fell.

Everywhere the lower lands adjacent to the streams had become marshes,
some of them extending for miles in a winding line, and occasionally
spreading out to a mile in breadth. This was particularly the case where
brooks and streams of some volume joined the rivers, which were also
blocked and obstructed in their turn, and the two, overflowing, covered
the country around; for the rivers brought down trees and branches,
timbers floated from the shore, and all kinds of similar materials,
which grounded in the shallows or caught against snags, and formed huge
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