A man stands on the high sea-wall, solitary like a Roman centurion watching from the last rampart of the land. To the north the wall reaches away, narrowing, flattening. From its vanishing there rises – four miles off but seeming much closer – the grey loafshape of St Peter’s Chapel. And unseen, lost deep in the mud to the east of the Chapel, lie the last fragments of the Roman fortress of Othona. To the south a similar diminishing hairline of sea-wall winds out to the horizon. Above it, five miles removed, is the faint blur of Foulness Island and the uplifted thorn of its church spire. Foulness. Already the name has a cold and final sound. There is barbed wire in it, and emptiness. It is the future. Quickly the watcher looks away.
Inland, the flat fields fade to the first trees, elm-rows, farm-clusters. A mile of empty fields, some still dark, some stippled green with April corn. The farms are far apart. Between them the blue distance is a misty forest. Many skylarks sing above the fields, redshanks call from the endless dyke that runs beside the wall. Seaward, there is no sea yet; only the vast moorland of the slumberous saltings three-quarters of a mile wide, with a long silver creek snaking up into the skyline; nothing but saltmarsh, skylarks, redshanks calling, and the distant horizon voice of a curlew. North-eastward the saltings are narrower. There are mudflats visible beyond, pebbled with feeding waders and the shining white stones of shelduck. Above them floats the thin ethereal cloudline of the waves. And above the remote blue of the sea, shining in sunlight ten miles way, the buildings of Claxton glitter like the towers of Xanadu.
This is the Dengie coast, seven miles of sea-wall north to south, a great arc of saltings outside it, half a mile of mudflats beyond. An austere place perhaps, withdrawn, some might say desolate. But the silence compels. It is very old silence. It seems to have been sinking slowly down through the sky for numberless centuries, like the slow fall of the chalk through the clear Cretaceous sea. It has settled deep. We are under it now, we are possessed by it. When strangers come here, many will say, ‘It’s flat. There is nothing here’. And they will go away again. But there is something here, something more than the thousands of birds and insects, than the millions of marine creatures. The wilderness is here. To me the wilderness is not a place. It is the indefinable essence or spirit that lives in a place, as shadowy as the archetype of a dream, but real, and recognizable. It lives where it can find refuge, fugitive, fearful as a deer. It is rare now. Man is killing the wilderness, hunting it down. On the east coast of England, this is perhaps its last home. Once gone, it will be gone forever. And of course it is doomed. The mountains, the moors; for a time, for a few decades, they will shelter the wilderness still. But it will go down. The habitat may look much the same: just a reservoir or two, the hydro-electric temples, the tight clasp of a motorway, the roaring concrete of airports. But the wilderness cannot endure these things. It is the goaded bull at bay, pierced by the lance of the picador, bewildered by the pain of the spiked banderillas spraying up from its back like a crown of thorns awaiting the quietus of the ritual sword.
I walk out across the saltings. This is an ancient path, marked out by stakes and withies, but there are deep gutters to ford, narrow rills to leap across. Sea aster, sea lavender, glasswort, and samphire, grow thickly, matted like heather. There is a sea smell, and a mud smell. The saltings are dark green in shadow, tawny in the sun. Many skylarks sing high above in the mauve haze of the mild April afternoon. Gulls circle lazily, and occasionally call. Big white clouds rise slowly from the rim of the sea but do not come any nearer. The easterly breeze is gentle, without hostility. A kestrel hovers: tremor and pause, floating glide, tremor and pause; hunting hunger balanced by infinite patience. Far back across the saltings, the sea-wall is now only a low ruled line. A few dark specks revolving beyond are rooks above the hidden elms deep down inland. All is so flat and endless now that one seems to be at the bottom of a steep-sided valley, with land and sea rising all around. The eye has forgotten perspective. There is solitude here, utter unblemished solitude.
Suddenly, I come to the steep ten-foot escarpment of the saltings. A huge plain of mud reaches out to the horizon, brown, or yellow, or bleached white where there are patches of sand or shining shingle. The sea is nearer now, blue-grey, but still far out, as though it were quite motionless and innocuous. But it is moving in. The tide has turned, and slowly the expanse of mud is narrowing, the sea growing taller and greyer above it. I raise my arms till they rest upon the horizon. Hundreds of waders rise as though conjured up into the sky. Smoothly the sky turns through the bright sphere of my binoculars, articulate with birds. Mallard and teal rise steeply. The voices of the curlew and dunlin and redshank rise and fall over the gleaming mud. A hundred yards off, a ringed plover has not yet flown. But it jerks and bobs uneasily, and its rounded call sounds constantly within its soft plump body, like the melancholy tolling of a distant bell-buoy. The bird is much closer than the sound. Far out, under the line of the sea some grey plover are still feeding. Swishing low overhead, the wader flocks hurtle down; they tremble silvery, and rise into twists of golden-brown, like smoke, then rain, fish-scale shimmer, the shapes of fins or curved sails, composing, erasing. Now the ringed plover has flown. It sweeps low, singing as it flies. The swarms of waders settle on the mud; redshank and skylark sing again.
The east coast is purest in winter: thorned wind from the ice-age numbing the hands and face, the small December sun withering down, the inland west kindling briefly before a cold unearthly dusk. The few dead stunted trees that grew here are the bones of the east wind. When the tide is high, huge rafts of whistling wigeon and silent mallard float over the hidden saltings, rising and falling in rhythm on the undulant water. Dark lines of Brent geese claw steadily along the shore of the sky. Sometimes the grey clouds of knot and dunlin on the mudflats are fired upward by a merlin’s phantom flickering, by a low rushing and darting over mud and marsh faster than the eye can follow. More rarely, a merlin will fly higher, black star-shape twinkling through white sky, beneath it a delirium of panting wings. From the sea-wall, where the grass is long, one may flush a short-eared owl, the flowing brown bird sailing and rowing silently away without haste, the easy languid flight seeming to express a noble disdain. This is a splendid spring day, tranquil and relaxing. But in winter there is a greater fulfillment. A man then is very small and puny, a cringing figure under the vast power and solitude of the sky.
The mudflats are flooded now by the incoming tide, and the shallower lakes of yellow or brown that still shine through are filling with grey sea. It is time to go back to the sea-wall, passing again under the bright chains of lark-song, under the slanting trill of a meadow pipit. Curlew and redshank rise and call, as they have done on this coast for thousands of years, as they called from the shores of the old Cretaceous sea, long before the first man appeared. I stumble over a dead, mummified object. It is a red-throated diver so matted and bound with oil as to be almost unrecognizable, the mere torso of a bird. It stinks of oil. It is an atrocity, a stumpy victim of our modern barbarity. Born, perhaps, upon some island in a Scottish loch, cherished by local birdlovers, watched to maturity, then seen to depart in the full power and splendour of its beauty, a messenger from the wilderness: now here it has been returned like a crushed and mutilated fugitive thrust back across a frontier. We must not let its death be soothed away by the lullaby language of indifferent politicians. This bird died slowly and horribly in a Belsen of floating oil, as thousands of others have done, as millions more may do in the vile years to come. Involuntarily my gaze turns towards Foulness, towards the future.
I blunder on across the saltings, in too great a rage to see or hear anything clearly. After a day of peace, I have seen the ineffaceable imprint of man again, have smelt again the insufferable stench of money. A yellow wagtail flits ahead of me, a brilliant torch flaming up into the sun. That at least seems to be still clean, still untainted. Yet who can know what insidious chemical horror may be operating beneath those brilliant feathers.
The evening has come, and the tide still rises. Soon it will cover the saltings. The breeze is strengthening. Night and wind and tide are moving in together. A primrose sky has flowered beyond the western trees; to the east there is a narrow band of purple above the grey line of the sea. Very far off, near one of the tree-guarded farms, a blackbird sings. Slowly the light gathers in the west, and the sky reddens. The dusk drifts down upon the darkening tide. A swallow comes in from the sea, swoops blue over the dyke, and fades black as it flits inland. Gulls are coming out from the land to roost; they call as they glide down to the saltings. Yet still the silence deepens, made more profound by the shallow cries of hundreds of hidden birds. A partridge calls near the shadowy dyke, and the first stars hover above the rising sea. The few scattered lights of Foulness shine up one by one, like candles burning about a dark catafalque. I seem weightless now, suspended in the grains of the dissolving day. The greatness of the sea-night closes above me as I kneel in the spring grass of the wall.
In ten years’ time, the largest airport in the world will have been built a few miles from here. Then, night and day, the endless barrage or roaring sound will tear away this silence forever and this last home of the wilderness will be imprisoned in a cage of insensate noise. Cordoned by motorways, overshadowed by the huge airport city, the uniqueness of this place will be destroyed as completely as though it has been blown to pieces by bombs. It is not merely that this incredible barbarism will be inflicted upon us. One grieves that such a wonderful opportunity has been cast away, a chance to preserve the coastline of Essex, from Shoeburyness to Harwich, to protect it from further urban encroachment, to keep it unchanged as a national nature reserve. Essex has suffered so much; the new towns, the vast growth and overspill of London, the lancing through of motorways. We could at least have been allowed to keep the best of our county, the peace of its ancient bird-haunted coast that is the only peace that is left. All we can do now is to try to preserve whatever may remain, so that some of the wild life will survive. Then the birds will still call as they have done today, though the sound will never reach us. But they were here before the coming of man, they will endure the shadow of our tyranny, they will fly out into the sun again when we have gone.