And round and round the sand,
As far as eye could see;
The blinding mist came down and hid the land--
And never home came she.

Oh is it weed, or fish, or floating hair--
A tress o' golden hair,
O' drown'ed maiden's hair,
Above the nets at sea?
Was never salmon yet that shone so fair,
Among the stakes on Dee.

They rowed her in across the rolling foam,
The cruel, crawling foam,
The cruel, hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea;
But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home,
Across the Sands o' Dee.

Charles Kingsley and the poem become nearer and dearer to us than ever
with the knowledge that he was a cousin of Grenfell, and knew the
Sands o' Dee, over which Grenfell tramped and hunted as a boy, for the
sandy plain was close by his father's house.

There was a time when the estuary was a wide deep harbor, and really a
part of Liverpool Bay, and great ships from all over the world came
into it and sailed up to Chester, which in those days was a famous
port. But as years passed the sands, loosened by floods and carried
down by the river current, choked and blocked the harbor, and before
Grenfell was born it had become so shallow that only fishing vessels