Heart Of The Fens

Off we go for a stroll in the heart of the peat fens, following the path between the Ouse Washes and the New Bedford River also known, even more poetically, as The Hundred Foot Drain. You'll need boots and a jacket, but you can leave the map and compass behind, our route has two kinks in it, but is otherwise straight. And when we've had enough we'll turn around and come back by the same path.

The Fens are not what they were a few hundred years ago. Then they were a wild, watery world that flooded in winter, but where cattle could be grazed on the drier parts during the summer. It was a landscape that was impenetrable except to those with local knowledge. Fishing and wildfowling were mainstays of the economy in those days.

Fishing and wildfowling still take place on a much smaller scale and with much tighter restrictions, and here on the Washes it still floods in winter and cattle are grazed in summer. The rest of the land, everything apart from the Washes, is now under the plough, thanks to the drainage works that have been carried out from the Roman period up till the present day.

The bit you always learn about in school, if you come from these parts, is the work carried out in the seventeenth century by Cornelius Vermuyden. He was born a Dutchman though became a British citizen and was responsible for many drainage schemes in England. His idea for the Fens was to build a straight canal which would shorten the meandering course of the Great Ouse River and get the water to the sea more rapidly.

This did not completely solve the problem, so Vermuyden proposed building another straight channel, parallel to the first but about half-a-mile (or roughly 1 Km) away. The land in between was to be allowed to flood if rainfall was such that the two channels (known as the Old Bedford and the New Bedford Rivers) were not able to get the water away.

Vermuyden's reputation ebbs and flows too; sometimes it's fashionable to stress that he left much of the day-to-day supervising of the scheme to others, and then someone else points out that he'd also foreseen the need for other improvements which were not carried out till major floods occurred much later.

There seems to be a lesson to be learned here: you can exploit most of the land but you need to leave some to act in the normal way. These Washes now stand as a sort of metaphor for the long-lost landscape of the original Fens, with cattle grazing in summer and the land allowed to flood in winter.

And it just so happens that early October is the tipping-point between summer and winter. With heavy and persistent rains forecast in the next few days the farmers have decided it's time to round up their cows. Quad-bikes and huge lorries are the chosen tools for the job these days.

The landscape, even on the Washes, is probably not exactly as it was originally, but it's near enough for many bird species to have recolonised the area. We were blessed with a fly-by from a Great White Egret, a new species to these islands in the last decade or so. Had we stuck with our plan and driven a little further north we'd have seen over forty Common Cranes; another bird which has increased in numbers recently.

Instead we went south, under steadily darkening skies, and came across a thatched witch on a rooftop in Bluntisham. We did intend to investigate Berry Fen and Barleycroft Lake but....

Methinks they got those cows moved just in time.

The beginning of October always brings to mind the turning of the seasons and the slipping away of time. "Across the evening skies all the birds are leaving....."

Take care.