boundary upon the North Denes, has been all but exterminated, and the sand-dunes levelled for golfing and building purposes.
To the west of the town lies a great alluvial level, once the bed of the Garienis Ostium. Dyked and drained, this large area forms most valuable marshland, affording pasturage for many herds of cattle. The famous Broads are remains of this fine estuary. Breydon, another portion of it, five miles long and one in width, at the juncture of the Yare, Waveney, and Bure, remains a great salt-water tidal basin; its northern point reaches the town quays. "By the improved banking of the rivers" a large tract that was once under water has been reclaimed, and the drainage and cultivation following have, in the course of years, produced great changes in the natural productions of the district. The country a few miles northward becomes more hilly and wooded, as it does southward of Breydon. There is, however, nothing deserving of the name of a wood, except at Fritton, within the ten mile radius included in this paper.
Very pithily and concisely the Pagets (referring to the various classes of the local fauna) remark:—"In none of them have the changes described as taken place, in consequence of cultivation, been so much felt as in the Mammalia, nearly all of which, with the exception of the few species which it is a matter of profit to preserve, are either totally exterminated, or in rapid progress towards being so." To the few exceptions referred to may be added such as from their amazing fecundity, and the gradual extirpation of their natural enemies, are becoming a pest and a scourge to cultivation itself; the Field Vole and the Brown Rat are instances in proof. And so long as the lesser birds of prey and the Weasel family are so incessantly persecuted, will this evil continue and increase.
Lubbock[1] makes mention of a species of Dog—the black curly-coated Retriever—as "very common here, though not entirely peculiar to the county—the Yarmouth Water-Dog, as they are generally termed in other parts of England." The sagacity of this species is referred to in the case of one kept many years ago at a drainage mill adjoining Breydon. It regularly searched the flint-stone "walls" in winter for wounded wildfowl, which usually seek some nook or cranny. "When the
- ↑ 'Fauna of Norfolk,' p. 4 in 1845 edition.
