Читать книгу Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire онлайн

4 страница из 129

MARSH AND FEN

At the outset the reader must identify himself so far with the people of Lincolnshire as to make himself at home in the universally accepted meanings of certain words and expressions which he will hear constantly recurring. He will soon come to know that ‘siver’ means however, that ‘slaäpe’ means slippery, that ‘unheppen,’ a fine old word (—unhelpen), means awkward, that ‘owry’ or ‘howry’ means dirty; but, having learnt this, he must not conclude that the word ‘strange’ in ‘straänge an’ owry weather’ means anything unfamiliar. ‘Straänge’—perhaps the commonest adverbial epithet in general use in Lincolnshire—e.g. “you’ve bin a straänge long while coming” only means very. But besides common conversational expressions he will have to note that the well-known substantives ‘Marsh’ and ‘Fen’ bear in Lincolnshire a special meaning, neither of them now denoting bog or wet impassable places. The Fens are the rich flat corn lands, once perpetually flooded, but now drained and tilled; the divisions between field and field being mostly ditches, small or big, and all full of water; the soil is deep vegetable mould, fine, and free from stones, hardly to be excelled for both corn and roots; while the Marsh is nearly all pasture land, stiffer in nature, and producing such rich grass that the beasts can grow fat upon it without other food. Here, too, the fields are divided by ditches or “dykes” and the sea wind blows over them with untiring energy, for the Marsh is all next the coast, being a belt averaging seven or eight miles in width, and reaching from the Wash to the Humber.