Mysteries of the marsh

Marshes, levels, fens, bogs, mires, wetlands – these places, and the countless names for them, have long registered their eldritch presence in this island’s imagination. They are there in the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf – the looming morhopu [marshpool] from which Grendel, that mánscaða [evil being], lopes to seize his wretched human victims. They open Dickens’ Great Expectations, the first indelible landscape in child Pip’s ‘first most vivid and broad impression of things’:

the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and …   the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and … the distant savage lair from     which the wind was rushing, was the sea.

Pip’s ‘savage lair’ has something of Grendel about it. Intriguingly, recent historical interpretation of the epic has attempted to site the action in north Kent, in the territories where the early stages of Dickens’ novel is set and where I most enjoy birdwatching in the county. The Isle of Sheppey in winter still maintains a sense of wild down by the Swale estuary. The 11th-century name for Harty was Heorot (exactly the name of Hrothgar’s mead-hall in the poem) and the region itself was recorded as Schrawynghop in 1240, an Old English term, supposed to mean something like ‘marshland of malign creatures’. I cannot find anything convincingly academic on all this, but it’s an appealing notion.

At the end of October my partner and I spent time on the Blackwater Estuary in Essex. It’s become a favourite haunt – out east beyond the London fringe, the strain of M25 traffic, the crush of industry and towns with bad reps, out towards the flat miles and North Sea – where I meet a friend twice a year for a day’s walk round Old Hall Marshes. I wanted more time here, and booked a cottage nearby for a week. These days felt like ceremony or rite out on the coast, with the year finally turning bonfire colours, Ginny’s birthday, and the brent geese in from Artic colds. We went to embrace the solstice.

Looking across to West Mersea

Seen from above or on a map, the estuary’s mazing channels, more complex here than anywhere along the Essex coast, appear like the brain’s lobal crevices, or a nutmeg cut open to reveal its woody fissures. The saltmarsh shares these intricacies, secrets. Its bewildering waterways belong to the birds and seals.

It is surely this foreignness of marshland that makes it most alluring. Either side of the seawall at Old Hall, the land at times can feel thrillingly treacherous: dense, shifting reedbeds on one side, and thick, clutching mudflats on the other. Although managed and shaped by humans for centuries, these spaces still retain a sense of the un-human and impenetrable, and can still be reclaimed by unpredictable tides, as they were in 1953. The birds match the mystery of their lands. Bearded tits are most often unseen in the depths of their close, vertical world, and the bittern is so accustomed and coloured to this environment, imitates its home so well, it is remarkable no origin myths have passed down to tell of how the bird sheared from reed, ripped up from the very same material in which it skulks.

From the other side of the seawall, curlews and redshanks call in darkness. I fancy their songs sound desolate. They are not. But they are of the saltmarsh entirely, estuarine substance, coming to me along double-hidden creeks – out of view and under dark.