UNDER
CONSTRUCTION
FENLAND IN THE 1920s
RE-WILDING THE FENS
MANAGEMENT FOR WILDLIF
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FENLAND IN THE 1920s
Writing in 1769, William Gilpin, M.A., said of
the fens :—
" It is such a country as a man would wish to see
once for curiosity but would never desire to visit a second time.
One view sufficiently imprints the idea."
But Gilpin was a pessimist, and the fen has many
enduring charms. The Rev. Charles Kingsley said that " they have a
beauty of their own, these great Fens, even now when they are dyked
and drained, tilled and fenced, a beauty as of the sea, of
boundless expanse and freedom," and Mark Rutherford says there is "
the wide dome-like expanse of the sky, there is the distance, there
is the freedom, and there are the stars on a clear night."
The fen plain is the largest in the country,
covering some 13,000 square miles, formed by the gradual silting up
of a large bay, occupying a widespread hollow in the Jurassic
clays. In course of time it is probable that the whole of the Wash
will be similarly silted up. In the northwest corner of Suffolk
there is a big area of fen in the parishes of Mildenhall and
Lakenheath, but in Norfolk its extent is much greater, including
the land between the Great Ouse and Nene and between the lower
portions of the Little Ouse and Wissey. The boundary between
Norfolk and Cambridgeshire runs in a peculiar zigzag fashion,
following the course of the old channel of the Great Ouse. Until
the seventeenth century the effect of the tides was felt almost as
far as Cambridge. This prevented the fresh water from running away
rapidly, and perpetuated the bogs and morasses which then largely
formed the fens. Now, in all the fenland of Norfolk and Suffolk
there is no tract of unreclaimed fen except Stalode Wash which lies
south of the railway line between Lakenheath and Shippea Hill
stations.
At the present day the vegetation is a strange
mixture of plants of the chalk, marsh and fen. Arrowhead and water
violet grow in the dykes by which the greater spearwort is also
common. The lesser bladderwort may be found in vast quantities in
the mud at the bottom of the dykes in which it forms a regular
network, while the common bladderwort floats near the surface of
the water but is much less abundant. One marsh is covered with the
large white blossoms of the black bindweed which trail over rush
and sedge,and white and lilac blooms of the self-heal are not
uncommon. Sneezewort occurs rarely, but there are thickets of bog
myrtle and cladium, and wastes of reeds near the Little Ouse where
the otter has his lair.
The fen consists of a wide flat plain of black
soil stretching to a misty horizon, broken here and there by reed
beds, peat stacks, wind-battered trees, or an occasional house,
often constructed of wood. Low islands rise at intervals as at
Southery ferry, Hilgay and Shrub Hill, Feltwell, while further away
the great Isle of Ely was said in the twelfth century to be " beset
by great meres and fens as though by a strong wall."
There are no hedges or hills, and the country is
divided by dykes of shining water, as straight as arrows. At an
early stage it was covered with a succession of forests, and " fen
oak " obtained from the peat is still frequently used.
Spanning a drain in Feltwell Fen is the trunk of
a yew between 3 feet and 4 feet in diameter, which grew in the
primeval forest. The wolf, wild hoar, red deer, beaver and urus
lived in its fastnesses; and cranes, pelicans, and spoonbills in
the more swampy portions. The district known as Poppylot is
supposed by the late Professor Alfred Newton to have derived its
name from popeler, an old term for the spoonbill. Even in
comparatively recent times the place was a paradise for wild fowl.
So plentiful were the harriers that at Poppylot "Ship" the fenmen
amused themselves on Sundays by pelting each other with their eggs.
Herons nested on the sallows in the fen; bitterns, booming" like a
deep-mouthed bassoon," were very plentiful, and one fenman used to
have one roasted every Sunday for dinner; redshanks, ruffs and
ducks of all kinds abounded; short-eared owls were so common that I
have met a man who flushed thirty in one day while shooting over a
small piece of fen covered with dead rushes, about 2 feet in
height; the grasshopper warbler was familiarly known as the "
reeler," and the rare Savi's warbler has been found breeding at
Poppy-lot. John Speed recorded that in his day-
" This Fenny Country is passing rich and
plenteous, yea, and beautiful also to behold, wherein is so great
store of fish that strangers doe wonder, and water-fowl so cheape
that five men may therewith be satisfied with less than an
halfepenny."
Even some of those fairly familiar with the fens
are unaware of the stupendous nature of the works by which
engineers have converted a morass into some of the finest corn-land
in England. Though the reclamation of the fens was begun by the
Romans, complete drainage was not effected until the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, although
considerable work was done in the seventeenth century by Dutch
engineers. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries Marshland
was repeatedly " drowned," and in some cases neglect of the sea
walls was punished by placing the defaulter in the breach and
building him in, or at least so it is stated in Miller and
Skertchly's " Fenland." Ordinary high tide is 5 feet above the
level of the fens, spring tide 8 feet, and exceptional tides 12
feet, so that the engineering difficulties of protection from the
sea are enormous, though most of the floods of the past century
have been due to the fact that the river channels and the adjacent
" washlands " are insufficient to carry off the water from a heavy
fall of snow or long-continued rain. It is not generally
appreciated that until the twelfth century the outfall of the Great
Ouse was at Wisbech, and that it was the Little Ouse and its
tributaries that entered the Wash by way of Lynn. At that time a
cut was made from Littleport to Brandon Creek and the waters of the
Great Ouse were diverted into the Little Ouse, but the old course
of the river is still traceable in the almost grown-up channel of
the Old Welney river. Even in the sixteenth century the outfall of
the Nene was so choked with silt that the waters flowed back up the
old course of the Great Ouse to Little-port, and so to Lynn. The
Bedford Level drainage of the seventeenth century altered this. The
old and new Bedford rivers which enter Norfolk at Welney are
artificial watercourses 8 feet above the level of the old bed of
the Great Ouse. They separate the high land water from the fen
drainage, shortening the distance from Earith in Cambridgeshire to
Denver by ten miles. Until the formation of the Ouse Drainage Board
the Great Ouse, which has a length of 143 miles, with a catchment
area of about 1,750,000 acres, had four or five main channel
authorities, half a dozen authorities with power over protective
embankments only, and internal drainage boards, bringing the number
to nearly a hundred ; even then, only about half the river and
three- fifths of the floodable or waterlogged lands were
covered.
Denver Sluice near Downham Market, the flood-gate
of the Great Ouse and the finest river sluice in England, controls
the flood-water of 800,000 acres of land. The first sluice here was
built by The Adventurers in 1652, failing about 100 years later.
The second stood till 1828, and the present structure was begun in
1832. It consists of three drainage eyes 18 feet wide, the ebb and
flow being controlled by two pairs of immense leafed doors,
weighing 11 tons each. To the east of these is a huge pen sluice 74
feet long, 18 feet wide and with leafed doors capable of
controlling a 24 feet rise of tidal water. Horsemills " for the
speedier cleansing and scouring of the drains " were placed near
the river banks in the seventeenth century, but, in the first
quarter of the eighteenth century were replaced by windmills for
pumping, a process facetiously termed " grinding water." Those with
bucket wheels were utilised by the Dutch, but in the work of the
early nineteenth century scoop wheels were invariably employed,
although centrifugal pumps have been substituted in many cases and
erected in new stations. The wheel which lifts part of the water
from the Littleport and Downham drainage district into the Hundred
Foot river at Downham is 5 feet in diameter, has sixty scoops set
at a dip of 40 degrees from the radial line and possesses a lift
capacity of 17 feet. At full power it can discharge just under 200
tons a minute. This is probably the most powerful scoop-wheel plant
in England, and may possibly represent something like the maximum
desirable for fen conditions, as the weight of the plant is very
great.
Straight canals and ditches aided by numerous
pumping stations now carry the sluggish drainage from the land to
the river, the latter carrying it onwards to the sea.
In the year 1774 a wonderful voyage on the
Fenland waterways was made by the third Earl of Orford, of
Houghton, who is well known as having sold to the Empress of Russia
the remarkable collection of pictures known as the Houghton
Gallery, made by his grandfather, Sir Robert Walpole. The fleet
consisted of five sailing vessels, three tenders, and a "
bum-ketch," and a start was made from the Highbridge in the Straits
of Martin—a cut about a mile north-west of
Lakenheath—on July 17th. There was a numerous company on
board the fleet, and for twenty-two days they enjoyed themselves on
the rivers, cuts, and meres of the fens. The first day they
journeyed to Salter's Lode, the second to Whoresnest Ferry on the
Nene, the third to Palmer's Bridge on the Nene, and the fourth to
Peterborough, where they stayed two days. Journeying further, the
fleet reached Whittlesey Mere, stopped four days, returned to
Peterborough for three days, and to Whittlesey for three inore. On
the eighteenth day the fleet sailed to Ramsey Mere, spent the day
following on the Ramsey river, and the day after on the mere,
stopped the twenty-first night at Salter's Lode, and reached
Lakenheath the next afternoon. By no possibility could this journey
be made now—at least in the same fashion—as much of the
water over which they sailed is now replaced by dry land.
The Earl of Orford and Messrs. G. Farrington and
T. Roberts—volunteers on board the fleet—wrote accounts
of the voyage. In the three narratives the varying characteristics
of the writers are plainly evidenced, but that by Lord Orford is
undeniably the best. Very interesting is the verdict passed by
these travellers on the inhabitants of the fens. Mr. Roberts
describes the people in the Norfolk villages of Nordelph, Outwell
and Upwell, and the Cambridgeshire village of March, as " meanly
clad and dirty " ; Mr. Farrington says Outwell " is equally
remarkable for the ugliness of the inhabitants as for the
handsomeness of the church—a disagreeable, sallow complexion,
broad flat nose, and wide mouth predominating amongst them. They
are a mixture from a Dutch colony which we were informed settled
here at the time of the Revolution." Lord Orford says :—"
Many very old women in Upwell, Outwell and March ; the sex in
general extremely ugly."
Few districts in Norfolk are more inaccessible
and more remote from civilising influences than parts of the fen
country of which Feltwell Fen may be taken as typical. Feltwell is
one of the largest parishes in East Anglia, its area being over
nineteen square miles, and its density of population one person to
eight acres, or in the fen portion only, which occupies about half
the parish, one to sixteen acres. Until the last two or three
decades some of the dwellers in the more lonesome parts of these
fens were little removed from barbarism
They spoke uncouthly, were unkempt, and viewed
strangers almost as a native of Central Africa would view a white
man. The long months of winter, when it was almost impossible to
get a vehicle along the fen droves, tend to produce melancholy and
superstition, and the few outsiders who know a little of the inner
life of the fenmen are aware that in some households the
superstitious beliefs and practices are as wonderful as those of
any of heathen whom the foreign missionary societies to convert. A
remarkable account of these was given by the Rev. G. Roper in
Harper's Magazine in 1893, and though there is admittedly great
improvement with the passing of the years, perpetuation is more
probable where contact with outside influences is least.
In winter many of the roads are the abomination
of desolation. Making a road on fen peat or silt is by no means an
easy matter, as was found some fifty years ago, when thousands of
tons of stone were sent by barges on the Little Ouse from Brandon,
Weeting, Santon Downham and Thetford for the purpose of making up
main roads in the fens. In some places stone might almost as well
have been thrown into a bottomless bog, and in other places vast
quantities were utilised before an adequate road could be made. The
fen peat soaks up water almost like a sponge, and unmade roads with
deep ruts resulting from wheeled traffic are fearful places in the
winter time. In the winter of 1913 some of the inhabitants of
Feltwell and Feltwell Anchor sent a protest as to the state of the
roads to the rural Council.
The ratepayers said :—
" Our children slough to school through 6 inches
of mud and water on the roads and paths, which is undoubtedly the
cause of deaths and illness amongst them. They actually get stuck
in the mud, three and four at a time, and have to call for help to
get them out. If any of us are ill and dying in the night, we
cannot get a doctor until it is light, and not then sometimes. We
cannot bury our dead unless we convey them by river to the
grave."
And not only is the condition of the roads cruel
to children, but also to animals. Three powerful cart horses have
been seen unsuccessfully attempting to pull an empty tumbril on a
fen drove. This deplorable condition of the fen roads still recurs
in bad winters, and there seems no remedy save an expenditure which
it is beyond the means of the locality to incur.
There was formerly a decoy in that part of
Feltwell Fen lying about a mile from Brandon Creek, and a lease of
this decoy in 1742—that is before the fen was
drained—states that the rent of the land around was to be
£10 per year when dry and £5 when wet. It was to be
adjudged dry when " cattle may graze upon any part of the land to
feed upon any grass or hassock sward," etc. These days are gone,
and many parts of the fen are now extremely good agricultural land,
though the drainage rates are high. In 1747, 1,535 ducks were
captured in this decoy, and in 1752, 3,960, and delivered at "
Lakenheath Brig " at a cost of 6d. per dozen. This decoy has long
been drained, and only a depression in the ground marks its
site.
The history of this fen is a record of one long
struggle between man and nature, and though since the first Act for
the draining of the district was obtained in 1751, and another in
1806, man has gained the upper hand, several times within the
memory of many now living the waters resumed their old sway. In
1852 the bank of the Little Ouse burst in two places, one some 200
yards above Crosswater Staunch, and the other a quarter of a mile
below the footbridge near Feltwell " Anchor," where the writer once
obtained a cheap reputation for knowledge as one of those wonderful
persons who could " read a map." As a result of these breaches many
miles of Fenland were under water for several months. At that time
the fens were infested with vipers, and for weeks they were seen
sticking to the trees like huge leeches, but ultimately fell off
and were drowned, while hares also found a temporary shelter among
the branches. In some of the cottages the water was up to the
bedroom windows. In one the family carried their potatoes to the
bedroom, and were then rescued by a boat and taken to the high
land. A few days after a sheet was seen frantically waved from the
bedroom, and on investigation being made it was found that some
thieves had gone after the
potatoes, but that while they were getting them
their boat had drifted away, and they were left stranded.
Following the disastrous rainfall at the end of
August, 1912, a breach 100 yards in length was made in the bank at
Hoekwold, and much of the Hoekwold and Feltwell Fen was then
inundated. Early in 1915 there was another burst, and the Cross
Bank, protecting Southery Fen, also gave way under the pressure,
and a rich agricultural area was under water for a long 1hr
occupiers losing all their crops and much of their live
stock.
Yet though most of the fen in comparatively
recent times was undrained bog, it is now more productive than most
parts of the country, and probably few districts in England are
more intensively cultivated than the area known as Marshland, lying
in the triangle between Lynn, Downham Market and Wisbech. For the
most part it consists of a deposit of silt instead of the peat
found further south, varies between 10 and 20 feet above sea-level,
and though in places the fields and pastures are divided by
ditches, hedges are more general, and it has the appearance of
well- enclosed country rather than of fen.
Cultivation is carried on by the most approved
modern methods, and small holdings are nowhere more successful or
fulfil a more useful purpose in rural economy. This is due to a
variety of causes, but chiefly to the natural suitability of the
land for the cultivation of fruits and potatoes, although the most
characteristic areas are devoted to market gardening, in which the
cultivation of strawberries occupies a foremost position. Here
there is no waste of land. In the lines of apple and other fruit
trees, fruit bushes are planted between one tree and another, while
the space between the rows is used either for strawberries or
potatoes. That Marshland has not been recently reclaimed and
settled is testified by the magnificent churches, probably a finer
group than can be found elsewhere in East Anglia in a district of
like extent.
Clarke, W.G. (1921) Norfolk and Suffolk, Chapter 4,
A & C Black
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RE-WILDING THE FENS
It is extraordinary how wild birds will come
back, by instinct and choice, to their ancient haunts if once they
are given encouragement, peace and natural food. I proved this to a
remarkable degree when, in 1935, I bought a few hundred acres of
half-drained, reedy and lonely fenland near Burwell in
Cambridgeshire. It was useless as farmland, under water half the
year, dangerous for cattle and horses which got bogged in its peaty
softnesses, and utterly roadless and houseless. It lay between
Burwell and Reach Lodes—a windy, flat, wild triangle of
reed-beds and stinking pools, creamy with meadow-sweet in Summer,
shining with Autumn floods in the tail of the year. The clear
destiny for such a place was to let the floods have their way and
the land revert to wild fens. The Winter gales came and blew down
the black-boarded draining mill. The floods stayed. The waters
spread until a hundred and eighty acres became one great, shining,
straggling broad, walled by tall reeds, islanded by 'clumps of
savage-edged sedges and dotted here and there by wind-bent
willows.
Within a year the bitterns, which had not been
seen for half a century, returned to nest. Marsh harriers and
Montagu harriers came back to breed and hawk. The hen harrier beat
the Autumn levels. Duck of all sorts poured in from the windy fen
skies—mallard and teal, pochard and shoveller, tufted duck,
and even the rare and delicate little garganey teal. Gadwall reared
their young and once, on a fantastic September morn when the white
mists lifted like rent blankets from the face of the waters, I saw
six Egyptian cattle egrets—unbelievable visitors, probably
from Whipsnade or Lilford. Wild geese came in Winter, both grey and
bean, and wild swans filled the Winter sky with the windy
harp-notes of their wings. Herons, grey and immaculate, fished the
shallow pools, and peewits fell on stumbling wings and wept their
mournful laments. There were redshank like dancers in the peaty,
brown shallows, and reed warblers creeping like mice among the
reeds. The grasshopper warbler bewitched the Summer night with his
reeling songs, and terns in Summer screamed thinly in the bright
air or fell like flashing plummets into the waters where pike
swirled and roach and rudd moved in slow, golden shoals.
For seven years it was a place of beauty and
solitude, a lost recaptured echo of the old, wild fens of Stuart
England. In Summer it was starred with water lilies, pale yellow
with meadow-sweet, a network of glittering waterways and tall green
reeds which would hide a man in a punt for a day and leave him to
an utter solitude of time and space. In Autumn the great reed-beds
turned rusty gold, then tawny, till they faded into the burnt brown
of Winter, and the waters took on the steel of January skies. It
was too good to last, that place of beauty and of birds. The war
came and the drainers came. Tunnels were dug, and slowly the waters
fell. The reeds stood dry and rustling in forlorn, waterless
desolation. They were mown down and burnt in swirling clouds of
thick smoke which rolled across the country for miles, until even
distant Newmarket was blanketed one afternoon by the prairie fires
which wiped out that echo of an older and lovlier England.
Today the land is black, rich and unbeautiful.
J.
Wentworth Day (1943) ‘The Most English Corner of all England,
Countryside Mood, Blandford Press
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MANAGEMENT FOR WILDLIFE