The Fens
The Fens are an area of former
wetlands in the counties of
Cambridgeshire,
Lincolnshire and
Norfolk in eastern
England. The region lies west and south of
The Wash. It now covers approximately
1,300 km² (320,000 acres), but in 1911 the
Encyclopaedia Britannica estimated its extent as being considerably over half a million acres (2,000 km²). Geologically, the fenlands are a silted-up bay of the
North Sea that embraces the lower drainage basins of the rivers
Witham,
Welland,
Nene and
Great Ouse.
Wisbech is known as the "Capital of the Fens".
Ecologically, a
fen is a nutrient-rich freshwater environment in which dead but undecayed plant matter has accumulated to the point where most or all of the remaining vegetation is
emergent.
300 years ago, the Fens were similar to the
Florida Everglades, a large area of low-lying land, though in a cooler climate. The Fens and fenmen have their own history and distinctive cultural characteristics. When need be, a few of the native fenmen moved about nimbly on
stilts (the "stilt-walkers"). They opposed incursions by outsiders and defended their valuable traditional rights of commonage, turf cutting, fishing and fowling. The fenman's way of life was different from that of others so outsiders were sometimes suspicious of him. The aristocratic Hereward Leofricsson, later called
Hereward the Wake, who was raised on the fen margin, opposed the loss of his inheritance to the
Norman incomers in around the year 1070.
At the end of the most recent
glacial period, known in Britain as the
Devensian, ten thousand years ago,
Great Britain was joined to
Europe, notably, by the ridge between
Friesland and Norfolk. The topography of the bed of the North Sea indicates that the rivers of the southern part of eastern
England would flow into the
River Rhine, thence through the English Channel. From The Fens northward along the modern coast, the drainage flowed into the northern
North Sea basin, which, in turn, drained towards the Viking Deep. As the land-ice melted, the rising sea level drowned the lower lands, ultimately establishing the World's modern coasts.
Around five thousand years ago, previously inland woodland of the Fenland basin became salt-marsh, a saltwater environment, and fen, a freshwater environment. In general, people writing of the Fens have been vague about the nature of the different sorts of wetland once found there. However, it is clear that the English settlers who named the various features of the place from about the year
450 onwards, noticed eight kinds.
*Wash, which at greater or shorter intervals had bodies of water flowing over it, as in tidal mud-flats or braided rivers.
*
Marsh, which was the higher part of a tidal wash on which salt-adapted plants grew. It is generally, now usually called salt-marsh. This probably arises from the fact that salt was produced in such places.
*
Tidal creeks. For naming purposes, the English settlers seem to have ignored them unless they were big enough to be regarded as havens. The creeks (in the British sense) reached from the sea, into the marsh, townland and in some places, the fen.
*Townland, a broad bank of silt on which the settlers built their homes and grew their vegetables. This was the remains of the huge creek
levees developed naturally, mainly during the Bronze Age.
*Fen, a broad expanse of nutrient-rich shallow water in which plants had grown and died without fully decaying. The outcome was a flora of emergent plants growing in saturated
peat.
*Moor. This developed where the peat grew above the reach of the land-water which carried the nutrients to the fen. Its development was enabled where the fen was watered directly by rainfall. The slightly acidic rain washed the hydroxyl ions out of the peat, making it more suitable for acid-loving plants, notably
Sphagnum species. This is exactly the same as
bog but that name entered English from the
Irish language. Moor has a Germanic root and came to be applied to this acid peatland as it occurs on hills.
*Mere, an expanse of shallow, open water. It was more or less static but its shallow water was aerated by wind action.
*Rivers.In general, of the three principal soil types found there today, the mineral-based
silt, resulted from the energetic marine environment of the creeks, the
clay was deposited in tidal mud-flats and salt-marsh while the
peat grew in the fen and bog. The peat produces the black soils which are directly comparable with the American
muck soils.
This aerial photograph shows
Boston at the bottom and the pale silt land along the margin of The Wash. The palest fields just inland from Boston are covered in plastic to warm the soil early in the season. The dark peat land of the fen and the moor of East Fen lies inland from the silt while the peat of West Fen lies further inland still, beyond the
Devensian moraine at
Stickney. The pale upland of the
Wolds is at the top edge.
The Romans constructed the road, the
Fen Causeway across the fens to join what would later become
East Anglia and central England:
Denver to
Peterborough. They also linked
Cambridge and
Ely but generally, their road system avoided The Fens except for minor roads designed for extracting the products of the region. These were notably, salt and the products of
cattle: meat and leather.
Sheep were probably raised on the higher ground of the townlands and fen islands, then as in the early nineteenth century.
In the past thousand years, the marsh has been found along the coast of
The Wash, the remaining tidal waters. Moving inland, next there is a broad bank of
silt deposited until the Bronze Age, on which the early post-Roman settlements were made. Inland again is the former fen proper. (Compare the sequence of salt-marsh, spit and fen formerly found at
Back Bay, Boston, Mass.) From these settlements, the silt strip is known as The Townland. How far seaward the Roman settlement extended is unclear owing to the deposits laid down above them during later floods. It is clear that there was some prosperity on the Townland, particularly where rivers permitted access to the upland beyond the fen. Such places were
Wisbech,
Spalding and
Swineshead, this last, replaced a thousand years ago by
Boston. All the Townland parishes were laid out, elongated as strips, to provide access to the products of fen, townland, marsh and sea. On the Fen-edge, parishes are similarly elongated to provide access to both upland and fen. The townships are therefore often nearer to each other than they are to the distant farms in their own parishes.
For about two hundred years after the English began to settle the Townland and the upland of East Anglia and Lincolnshire, there remained in the Fens themselves, a relict Romano-British culture. The people were known as the
Gyrwe, which name is likely to come from their word for "drovers" (compare
Welsh gyrwyr). The cattle trade persisted well into the modern historical period as the means of livelihood in
Crowland.
The earliest monastic settlements, distributed just inside The Fens appear to have arisen from the wish of English rulers to subvert the traditions of these people as a step towards controlling them. Beginning about the middle of the 7th century, the monks progressively built churches, monasteries and abbeys. They found themselves only moderately safe in the protection of the fens during the time of the
Danish raids in the ninth and tenth centuries.
The royal forest
For a period in most of the
twelfth century and the early
thirteenth century, the south Lincolnshire fens were
afforested. The area was enclosed by a line from
Spalding, along the
Welland to
Deeping, then along the
Car Dyke to
Dowsby and across the fens to the Welland. It was disafforested in the early thirteenth century, though there seems to be little agreement as to the exact dates or the opening and closure of the period. It seems likely that the disafforestation was connected with the
Magna Carta or one of its early thirteenth century re-statements, though it may have been as late as
1240. The Forest will have affected the
economies of the townships around it and it appears that the present
Bourne Eau was constructed at the time of the disafforestation, as
the town seems to have joined in the general prosperity by about
1280.
 |
The old steam drainage engine near Stretham |
Though some marks of Roman hydraulics survive, and the medieval works should not be overlooked, the land started to be drained in earnest during the
1630s by the various Adventurers who had contracted with
King Charles I to do so. The leader of one of these syndicates was the Earl of Bedford who employed –
Cornelius Vermuyden – as their engineer. The scheme was imposed despite huge opposition from locals who were losing their livelihoods in favour of already great landowners. Two cuts were made in the Cambridgeshire Fens to join the
River Great Ouse to the sea at
King's Lynn - the
Old Bedford River and the
New Bedford River, also known as the Hundred Foot Drain.
Both cuts were named after the
Fourth Earl of Bedford who, along with some "Gentlemen Adventurers" (
venture capitalists), funded the construction, which was directed by engineers from the
Low Countries, and were rewarded with large grants of the resulting farmland. Following this initial drainage, the Fens were still extremely susceptible to flooding, and so
windmills were used to pump water away from affected areas.
However, their success was short-lived. Once drained of water, the peat shrank, and the fields lowered further. The more effectively they were drained the worse the problem became, and soon the fields were lower than the surrounding rivers. By the end of the 17th century, the land was under water once again.
Though the three Bedford levels were, together, the biggest scheme, they were not the only ones.
Lord Lindsey and his partner, Sir William Killigrew had the Lindsey level (see
Twenty) inhabited by farmers by 1638 but the onset of the
Civil War permitted the destruction of the works which remained to the fenmen's liking until the Black Sluice
Act of 1765.
The major part of the draining of the Fens, as seen today was nevertheless, effected in the late 18th and early 19th century, again involving fierce local rioting and sabotage of the works. The final success came in the 1820s when windmills were replaced with powerful coal-powered
steam engines, such as
Stretham old engine, which were themselves replaced with diesel-powered pumps and following
World War II, the small electrical stations that are still used today.
The dead vegetation of the
peat remained un-decayed because it was deprived of air (the peat was anaerobic). When it was drained, the oxygen of the air reached it and the peat has been slowly oxidizing. This and the shrinkage on its initial drying as well as removal of the soil by the wind, has meant that much of the Fens lies below
high tide level. The highest parts of the drained fen now being only a few metres above
mean sea level, only sizable
embankments of the rivers, and general flood defences, stop the land from being inundated. Nonetheless, these works are now much more effective than they were until the mid-twentieth century. The question of rising sea level under the influence of
global warming remains.
In
2003, a project was initiated to return parts of the Fens to their original pre-agricultural state. Traditionally the periodic flooding by the North Sea, which renewed the character of the fenlands, was characterized as "ravaged by serious inundations of the sea, for example, in the years 1178, 1248 (or 1250), 1288, 1322, 1335, 1467, 1571" (
Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911). In the modern approach, a little farmland is to be allowed to flood again and turned into
nature reserves. By introducing fresh water, organizers of the Great Fen Project hope to encourage species such as the
snipe,
lapwing and
bittern. Endangered species such as the
fen violet will be seeded.
Many historic cities, towns and villages have grown up in the fens, sited chiefly on the few areas of raised ground. These include
*
Ely ("Isle of
Eels"), a cathedral city.
Ely Cathedral, on a rise of ground surrounded by fenlands, is known as the "Ship of the Fens".
*
Chatteris, a market town.
*
March, a market town and administrative centre of the
Fenland District.
*
Spalding, a market town, administrative centre of South Holland, and famed for its annual Flower Parade.
*
Whittlesey, a market town
*
Wisbech ("capital of the fens"), a market town.
*
Peterborough, a cathedral city, is the largest of the many settlements along the fen edge. It is sometimes called the "Gateway to the Fens".
Ancient sites include
*
Flag Fen, a bronze age settlement
The novels
The Nine Tailors by
Dorothy Sayers,
Hereward the Wake by
Charles Kingsley "
The Moon Tunnel" by
Jim Kelly and
Waterland by
Graham Swift are located here.
Peter F. Hamilton sets a number of his sci-fi novels in this area too, notably
Mindstar Rising and
A Quantum Murder.
Hal Foster set a portion of the childhood of
Prince Valiant in the Fens.
Cauliflower Drove is an internet murder mystery set in the Fens.
In
Northern Lights (novel), by
Philip Pullman, the Fens are home to the water-dwelling Gyptians, who hide the protagonist, Lyra, in the Fens.
Barnabas Sackett, patriarch of an American pioneer lineage detailed in the
Sackett novels by
Louis L'Amour, was born and raised in the Fens, which are a prominent setting of the first book in the series,
Sackett's Land.
*
National Trust conservation plans in The Fens.*
Somerset Levels, a similar area of wetlands in the southwest of England.
*
Hereward the Wake who led Saxon resistance to the Norman Conquest from the fens.
*
Wicken Fen, one of the few remaining undrained fens, owned by the
National Trust.
