undinted. It may be Roman, but it is probably earlier. Nothing else
was found, except some mouldering fragments of wood that looked
like spear-staves; and this, too, it seems, must have been a
boatload of warriors, perhaps some raiding party, swamped on the
edge of the lagoon with all their unused weapons, which they were
presumably unable to recover, if indeed any survived to make the
attempt. Hard by is the place where the great fight related in
Hereward the Wake took place. The Normans were encamped southwards
at Willingham, where a line of low entrenchments is still known as
Belsar's Field, from Belisarius, the Norman Duke in command. It is
a quiet enough place now, and the yellow-hammers sing sweetly and
sharply in the thick thorn hedges. The Normans made a causeway of
faggots and earth across the fen, but came at last to the old
channel of the Ouse, which they could not bridge; and here they
attempted to cross in great flat-bottomed boats, but were foiled by
Hereward and his men, their boats sunk, and hundreds of stout
warriors drowned in the oozy river-bed. There still broods for me a
certain horror over the place, where the river in its confined
channel now runs quietly, by sedge and willow-herb and golden-rod,
between its high flood banks, to join the Cam to the east.

But to return to my house. It was once a monastic grange of Ely, a
farmstead with a few rooms, no doubt, where sick monks and ailing
novices were sent to get change of air and a taste of country life.
There is a bit of an old wall still bordering my garden, and a
strip of pale soil runs across the gooseberry beds, pale with dust
of mortar and chips of brick, where another old wall stood. There
was a great pigeon-house here, pulled down for the shooting-box,
and the garden is still full of old carved stones, lintels, and
mullions, and capitals of pillars, and a grotesque figure of a