The Fens

The position of The Fens in eastern England.^[1]

The Fens, also known as the Fenland, consists of an area of former wetlands in the eastern part of England, stretching around the coast of The Wash from Lincolnshire to Norfolk and reaching into the historic counties of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire and Suffolk. These former wetlands consisted both of alkaline peat fen and silt freshwater and salt marshes which were virtually all drained by the end of the nineteenth century.

The drainage was organized into river drainage, the passing of upland water through the region and internal drainage of the land between the rivers. The internal drainage was designed to be organized by levels or districts each of which includes the fen parts of one or several parishes. The details of the organization vary with the history of their development but the areas include:

The Great Level of the Fens is the largest region of fen in Eastern England. Since the seventeenth century, it has also been known as The Bedford Level, after the Earl of Bedford who headed the seventeenth-century drainage adventurers in this area; his son became the first governor of the Bedford Level Corporation. During this period of drainage (which changed the landscape considerably but was largely unsuccessful), the Great Level was divided into three levels for administrative purposes:
- The South Level lies to the south-east of the Ouse Wash and surrounds Ely.
- The Middle Level lies between the Ouse Wash and the River Nene.
- The North Level lies between the Nene and the River Welland.
Deeping Fen, in the southern part of Lincolnshire, between the River Welland and the River Glen/Bourne Eau.
The Black Sluice District much of which was known as the Lindsey Level when it was first drained in 1639, from the Glen and Bourne Eau to Swineshead. Its water is carried through to the Haven at Boston

These were all re-drained at one time or another after the Civil War.

The Witham Commission Fens.
- First District: from Washingborough to Billinghay Dales.
- Second District: Holland Fen.
- Third District: north of the River Witham above Bardney.
- Fourth District: East, West and Wildmore Fens and the Townland from Boston to Wainfleet.
- Fifth District: Kyme Eau to Billinghay Skirth.
- Sixth District: Helpringham Eau to Kyme Eau.

These were drained in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^[2]

Introduction

The Fens are very low-lying compared with the surrounding chalk and limestone "uplands" that surround them, in most places no more than 5-10m above sea level. Indeed, owing to drainage and the subsequent shrinkage of the peat fens, many parts of the Fens now lie below mean sea level. The area is in fact home to the lowest land point in the United Kingdom, Holme Fen in Cambridgeshire, at around 2.75 metres below sea level.^[3] TL202893

Before they were drained in the modern period, the Fens were liable to periodic flooding, particularly in winter due to the heavy load of water flowing down from the uplands and overflowing the rivers. Some areas of the fens were permanently flooded, creating small lakes or "meres", while others were only flooded during periods of high water, but this was enough that in the pre-modern period arable farming was limited to the higher areas of the fen-edge, fen-islands and "townlands" (this was an arch of higher silt ground around the Wash, where the towns near the Wash had their arable fields). The rest of the Fenland was dedicated to pastoral farming, such as of cattle and sheep, as well as fishing, fowling, etc. In this way, the medieval and early modern Fens stood in contrast to the rest of southern England, which was primarily an arable agricultural region.

Since the advent of modern drainage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Fens have been radically transformed, such that today arable farming has almost entirely replaced pastoral, and today the economy of Fens is heavily invested in the production of crops such as grains, vegetables and some cash crops such as rapeseed.

The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica estimated the extent of the Fens as being considerably over half a million acres (2,000 km²), however, this estimation includes some of the Lincolnshire Fens which are not normally included in the Great Level, such as the lower drainage basins of the rivers Witham and the Welland, while excluding the fens on the east and north coasts of Lincolnshire. The Great Level itself, including the lower drainage basins of the Nene and the Great Ouse, now covers approximately 1,300 km² (320,000 acres). Significant towns in the fens include Boston, Spalding, Ely, Wisbech and King's Lynn.

Formation and Geography

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 coastlines of today.

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 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.

History

Pre-Roman Settlement

There is evidence for human settlement near the fens from Mesolithic period on; indeed, the evidence suggests that Mesolithic settlement in Cambridgeshire was particularly along the fen-edges and on the low islands within the fens, to take advantage of the hunting and fishing opportunities of the wetlands.^[4]

Roman Farming and Engineering

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. The Roman period also saw some drainage efforts, including the Car Dyke along the western edge of Fenland.

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.

After the end of Roman Britain, there is a break in written records. When written records resume in Anglo-Saxon England, the names of a number of peoples of the Fens are recorded in the Tribal Hidage and Christian histories. These peoples (with their supposed territories) include North Gyrwe (Peterborough/Crowland), South Gyrwe (Ely), the Spalda (Spalding), and Bilmingas (area of South Lincs).

The Medieval Fenland

In the early Christian period of Anglo-Saxon England, a number of Christian individuals sought the isolation that could be found among the wilderness that the Fens had become. These saints, often with close royal links, include Guthlac, Etheldreda, Pega, and Wendreda. Hermitages on the islands became centres of communities which later became monasteries with massive estates.

Monastic life was disrupted by Danish raids and settlement but was revived in the mid-10th century monastic revival.

These fenland monastic houses include Ely, Thorney, Crowland, Ramsey, Peterborough, and Spalding. As major landowners, the monasteries took a significant part in the early efforts at the drainage of the Fens.

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 deforested 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 deforestation was connected with the Magna Carta or one of its early thirteenth century restatements, though it may have been as late as 1240. The Forest would have affected the economies of the townships around it and it appears that the present Bourne Eau was constructed at the time of the deforestation, as the town seems to have joined in the general prosperity by about 1280.

Though the forest was about half and half in Holland and Kesteven, it is known as Kesteven Forest. (map)

Draining the Fens

Early Modern Attempts to Drain the Fens

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.

Many original records of the Bedford Level Corporation, including maps of the Levels, are now held by Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies at the County Record Office Cambridge.

Modern Drainage

The major part of the draining of the Fens, as seen today, was 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. The question of rising sea level under the influence of global warming remains. The Fens contain about 50% of the grade 1 soil in the UK, making it a valuable National resource.

Restoring the Fens

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.

Fen settlements

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".
Boston, port and administrative centre of the Borough of Boston.
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

Setting in fiction

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 (1983) are located here. Waterland was made into a film in 1992 (directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal), and many scenes were filmed at Holbeach Marsh on the edge of the Wash.

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, 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.

In one of The Belgariad novels, characters Garion, Belgarath and Silk row through marshy water channels in the Drasnian swamplands known as The Fens.

In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Salazar Slytherin is described by the sorting hat to come "from fen."

The Silver Chair by C.S.Lewis features a character called Puddleglum the Marshwiggle. He is a gloomy character who lives on eel and pike, a stereotypical fenlander (known colloquially as a 'Fenny').

Thorn, a short tale and Interactive Fiction by Eric Mayer, choses the Fens as a ghostly setting.

Martha Grimes uses the village of Algarkirk, Lincolnshire and the surrounding Fens as the setting of her mystery novel, The Case Has Altered.

Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Bookshop is set in the Fens.

The 1998 film Dad Savage (starring Patrick Stewart) was set and filmed around the King's Lynn area.

References

^ After Keith Lindley, Fenland Riots (1982)
^ Bedford Levels information from Ordnance Survey 1:50 000 First Series Sheets 142 (1974) and 143 (1974). Lincolnshire information from Wheeler, W.H. A History of the Fens of South Lincolnshire 2nd edn. (1896) facsimile edn. Paul Watkins (1990) ISBN 1-871615-19-4
^ "UK's lowest spot is getting lower". BBC.
^ Christopher Taylor, The Cambridgeshire Landscape (London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1973), 30.