‘It’s flat’ is the usual opinion I get when I tell people that I live in the village of Witcham, near Ely in Cambridgeshire. Not that I’m usually that specific, I generally say ‘near Cambridge’, at least you have a good chance of people having heard of that place the world over.
I spent the first few decades of my adult life trying to escape these flat bits of the country and seeking out instead hills and mountains. The only sports I’ve ever really got hooked on are mountaineering and surfing. There’s not much of that around Ely. There has always been a yearning to move somewhere more dramatic, but as I get older I have come to understand, and even quite like, the fens.
The Fens Aren’t Flat, No, Really…
Here’s the thing, the fens aren’t flat. Well OK, they are lower and less dramatically lumpy than the Lake District. But you soon get a feel for the landscape under your feet, and around here it’s secrets are unlocked slowly. It is undeniably a landscape hugely altered by human hand. Once an expanse of wetlands and islands it has been drained and carved into neat agricultural packages, becoming one of the most fertile farming regions in Europe. Don’t expect straight roads though, chicanes and hairpins are thrown at you and minor roads have dipped and warped due to the lack of anything solid underneath. Driving here is as dangerous as climbing a mountain pass, rather than precipitous crags we have unguarded river banks that every year claim lives.
I’m not really selling it very well am I? Well here’s the thing, I’ve lived all of my life in the Eastern counties of Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. I’ve become attuned to the land and it’s surprisingly large variety of landscapes, each different and distinct. I used to think the fens were a dismal product of industrial agriculture. The part I live in now is close to the Isle of Ely, that used to rise above the surrounding wetlands. All of the villages here about are built on the clay ‘hills’ (if you can call something that gets to the staggering height of 20 metres above sea level a hill). Once you start to explore a whole world of hidden habitats start to appear, you can walk for miles accompanied by skylarks and herons, see swans flying overhead and get buzzed by huge dragonflies.
Drains, Dykes and Droves
Look at a map and a spider web of ruler-straight blue lines emerges, man-made water courses stopping holding back the rising waters.. All working hard (as the water is in several places made to flow uphill by being pumped), to take the water from the fens out into the Wash up near King’s Lynn. From the edge of our village we can see the huge expanse of the Hundred Foot Washes, a flood plain between two huge man-made drainage channels, the New and Old Bedford Rivers, that stretch from Earith up to Downham Market. More prosaically this is also called the ‘Hundred Foot Drain’, after the distance between the tops of the two embankments on either side of the river. This artificial river is of course dead straight, designed by engineers in the 1600’s and built often by prisoners of the various wars we seemed to enjoy getting embroiled in. In fact the construction of the drain was interrupted by the Civil War.
The land enclosed between them forms the Ouse Washes, the largest area of ‘washland’ grazing pasture that floods every winter in the UK. 2,000 cattle graze along it and huge numbers of birds, including over wintering waders, ducks and swans, are attracted to the area. The RSPB , Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust and Wildlife Trusts are engaged on a huge project of conservation. There is one shining of example of fenland conservation in the shape of Wicken Fen, a National Trust reserve that shows what the fens were like (to some degree).
Footpaths to the Past
The key to unlocking the secrets of the fens are the countless miles of droves, trackways that were once used to move livestock from summer to winter pasture. This explains the insanely annoying fenland roads that chicane around fields. Long straights dotted with tight right angle or dog leg bends that seem designed to catapult your car into the adjacent field or river. Round here the fields were more important, so the roads had to fit their boundaries. Today they allow one to walk for miles and miles without having to step foot on roads. The pedestrian just has to share them with horses, bicycles, farm vehicles and the occasional gang of teenagers on dirt bikes. To be fair you rarely see any cyclists as the farm vehicles churn the droves into such ruts that cycling is impossible.
From our village we can walk in almost any direction on the droves, it becomes a challenge to join them up in different ways. Planning routes on a map soon opens up another avenue of detective work, the names of water courses and droves are often evocative of the past. Names that demand investigation, such as ‘sedgeway’, ‘hive’, ‘hythe’, ‘rushway’, ‘market way’, ‘clay way’, ‘tinker’s lane’. From just that list you get the materials for building, clay for bricks and sedge and rushes for thatching, the routes to markets and probably a lane that the nomadic tinker used to use travelling between places to ply their trade.
