Amy Glover, Dennis Sharp, 2021

The Failure of the Fens Amy Glover

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Wet / dry, public / private, transitory / permanent The Fennish The Fennish Today Infrastructure and Landform as Monument

It is difficult to define the Fens. They are an area of naturally flat lowlands stretching inland from the Wash estuary where the rivers Wellend, Witham, Nene and the Great Ouse find their way reluctantly into the North Sea. The National Character Area called the Fens crosses 3 ceremonial counties and 11 district councils. One of those district councils is called Fenland but by no means covers the extent of the area we are looking at.

The manipulation of the Fens is rooted in a very particular cultural understanding and attitude towards landscape. It is governed by a series of dichotomies constructed by humans in order to harness the landscape for their own needs. By dissecting these dichotomies - all closely related but nevertheless distinct - the aim is to show that they are human fabrications which do not need to exist and no longer contribute to a useful understanding of landscape. They include: wet / dry, permanent / transitory and public / private.

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WET / DRY, PUBLIC / PRIVATE, TRANSITORY / PERMANENT For thousands of years the Fens have been shaped by human intervention. A state of permanence (maintained through land drainage) has been striven for in order to maximise the productivity of the land. Evidence has been found of Bronze Age and later Roman channels and ditches cut into the landscape in order to remove water. The most significant period in the Fen history however was following the dissolution of the monasteries when huge swathes of the country were sold off and privatised. In the Fens, enclosure meant the enabling of much larger scale drainage schemes than ever before. New large landowners - such as the Earl of Bedford - could invest in projects led by Dutch engineers who brought their innovative techniques of pumping water out of the landscape in order to make it arable.

Before the enclosures the Fen landscape was a large wet common, farmed by peasants using the open field system. Farmers would use the cycles of the wetland to their advantage, growing reeds and sedges for thatching, harvesting peat for fuel, hunting wildfowl, fishing and grazing livestock on the dryer marshland during the summer months.1 Since the enclosures, the cycles that once dominated the Fens have been suppressed and the dryness of the landscape has been closely linked to its private ownership. Drainage allows for a level of certainty necessary for contemporary modes of production - intensive farming - to thrive. Therefore the value of the land relies on its continuous drainage.

The cycle of drainage is mechanised by a network of man-made waterways stretching over the Fens which direct water out into the Wash. These are controlled by a series of sluices and pumping stations. Where normally there would be a hedge, fence or wall marking the boundary between fields and property, in the Fens there is a ditch. This drainage network spatially marks edges of territory across the landscape and is maintained - by riparian landowners and by local government - in order to consolidate ownership over the land and to maximise its value through production.

When water is removed from the land, the peat shrinks resulting in a sinking ground level. In the Fens this means that the fields are getting further and further below sea level meaning that more and more energy is needed in order to pump the water out.

In many areas the ground level has sunk down lower than the ditches and waterways.

The result is that the banks and mounds supporting the ditches on either side need to be reinforced and widened so that they do not burst their banks. This inflating boundary condition is incrementally reducing the area of land that can be used for farming. The riparian landowners who are responsible for the maintenance of these 1

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Best, S., Sinclair, I., Willmoth, S. and Bode, S., 2008. Silicon Fen. London: Film and Video Umbrella.

Gang of drainers pose for a photograph 19th century 5

banks therefore are the operators of a slow removal of arable land; a product of their very efforts to retain it.

Despite efforts to fix the land and make it predictable for the benefit of farming, the opposite is happening. The only fixed geographical points in the Fens are the waterways and infrastructure which form a grid-like frame over the otherwise mutating landscape. Where the ground is not sinking, it is shifting instead. Fen Blow is the occurrence of strong winds which are whipped up over the flat plains of the Fens, causing storms of dust and dry topsoil which travel for miles. These events are caused by incessant drainage and the resultant dryness of the soil which is then easily shifted in large clouds across the landscape. The surface layer, blown out of its usual dimension and into the area occupied by sky, ignores boundaries of territory and ownership, it ignores ditches and rivers and roads. Previously flat, it becomes temporarily voluminous; a dark, billowing haze blurring edges between ground and sky.

Dry land has as much fluidity as wetland.

A fen blow across Hod Fen Drove Michael Trolove 6

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THE FENNISH The term ‘Fennish’ was coined by James Boyce in his book Imperial Mud.2 It is just one of the many words used to refer to the people of the Fens. Others include ‘Fenlanders’, ‘Fen-men’, ‘Fen-dwellers’, ‘breedlings’, ‘slodgers’ and ‘Gyrwe’. The amount of names by which they are referred to is testament to the strong regional identity that the Fennish share. Like many wetland communities around the world, the Fennish have been seen as outsiders throughout history. This is in part due to the physical inaccessibility of their landscape cutting it off from the surrounding uplands. It can also be put down to the particularities of farming in wetland areas.

The unknown is a notion often associated with watery landscapes and the Fens are no different. They are riddled with myths based on their harsh conditions and mysterious weather phenomenons such as Fen Blow. Fenrir - meaning ‘fen-dweller’ - the monstrous wolf of Norse mythology is said to live in a bog. Numerous legends have risen from the dark landscape, they are the folk lore of the Fennish but also contribute to the perception of them from the outside.

The alienation of the Fens and the Fennish could also be due to the prevalence of a form of malaria in marshland areas where mosquitoes lived. Historically, malaria was known as ‘ague’ or ‘marsh fever’ and it was believed to be carried through dirty air. Since Roman times, the disease was associated with the dark fog that often hung over the Fens (malaria comes from the Medieval Italian ‘mal aria’ meaning ‘bad air’). Those who weren’t from the Fens feared they would get the disease if they went there. Merchants who traded there would refuse to travel off the main routes into ‘the depths of the Fens, leaving the distribution of goods to local tradesmen’.3 Ague became much less common in the Fens in the early twentieth century and eventually disappeared completely. This is one positive effect of the intensive drainage schemes put in place during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The draining of the land meant a reduction in the amount of stagnant water, the breeding ground for the disease.

Boyce refers to the draining of the Fens at various points in their history and their enclosure as an imperial act, dispossessing land from the Fennish people who had been tied to it for centuries.4 Following the enclosures, the investment from large landowners - including the Crown - paid for the importation of Dutch engineers and their drainage techniques. The Fens as we know them today were ‘constructed 2 3

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Boyce, J., 2020. Imperial Mud : The Fight For The Fens. Icon Books, Limited.

Nicholls, A., Bhattacharya, S., Chakraborty, A., Alberts, T., Fauvel, A. and Yasuda, K., 2000. Fenland ague in the nineteenth century. Medical History, 44(4), pp.513-530.

Boyce, J., 2020. Imperial Mud : The Fight For The Fens. Icon Books, Limited.

Ague and Fever Thomas Rowlandson, 1788 9

as part of a wider alliance between the British and the Dutch (one that prefigures the ever-closer economic ties that now exist between Britain and the United States)’.5 Boyce describes the arrival of the Protestants and their drastic approach to controlling the landscape prompting a period of purification of the land and its people. Drainage became a tool for cleansing the ground and for suppressing local farming techniques, means of access and the common use of land.

This is just one example of the complex relationship between the Fens and the Fennish folk that inhabit them. Their landscape has been harnessed as a tool for cultural control and for maximising value by those who have the power and stability to do so. Somewhere along the way, the Fennish themselves have been somewhat forgotten. The word ‘fen’ itself has come to have new meanings, it is often misunderstood to refer to the artificial state of the landscape today rather than its wetland origins. The meaning of the word ‘fen’ has changed with the collective memory held in its morphing landscape.

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Best, S., Sinclair, I., Willmoth, S. and Bode, S., 2008. Silicon Fen. London: Film and Video Umbrella.

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THE FENNISH TODAY Due to hundreds of years of intensive drainage and the highly fertile, flat ground of the Fens, today it is the most important area for agricultural production in the UK. Nearly 40% of the vegetables grown in the open in England are grown in the Fens.6 They produce 24% of potatoes, 17% of sugar beet and enough wheat to make 250 million loaves of bread a year.7 It becomes clear why the landscape is so steadfastly protected from flooding and from uncertainty despite it being an expensive and unsustainable process.

The Fens have a much more diverse population now. Due to the agricultural importance of the area in general, many migrant workers have located there, they are mostly employed in horticulture, agriculture, food packing and processing.8 Compared to the rest of the UK in general, the Fens have ‘experienced lower levels of immigration over the longer term, but higher levels over the short term – particularly from Eastern Europe, and mainly into what the UK immigration rules term lower-skilled jobs’.9 Despite the reliance on migrant labour for the agricultural sector which makes up most of their economy, in the Brexit referendum of 2016 the Fens voted overwhelmingly to leave. In Fenland (just one of the eleven district councils within the much larger area of the Fens and one of the most deprived areas in the country), the Leave campaign won 71.4% of votes.10 This was a pattern across the Fens with an average of 65.2% voting ‘Leave’. Four of the only nine areas in the country to vote over 70% ‘Leave’ were in the Fens.11

is used and protected in vain and also in the political standpoints that arise there.

A similarity can be drawn in the Fens. The manipulation of the landscape - by outside forces - has served to construct an economy driven by intensive production dependant on a landscape of fluidity and uncertainty.

It is clear that many of those who voted to leave the EU were communities that felt overlooked and left behind by the rest of the country and by Europe. There is a fundamental geographical characteristic of (particularly rural) lowland areas in the UK which undoubtedly would contribute to that mentality. The threat of flooding in the lowlands does not come only from the sea; from outside. Water runs down from the uplands, especially from the increasingly built-up urban uplands. Those in lower areas are forced to bare the brunt of upland water runoff through insurance policies, protection costs and the mental burden of the constant risk of upheaval.

In fact, ‘Leave’ strongholds were centred around lowland areas all over the UK. In his book Low Country: Brexit on the Essex Coast, Tom Bolton travels through the estuary marshlands and industrial estates of Essex dwelling on histories that are revealed by artefacts left in the lowland landscape.12 He observes an uncertainty running through every aspect of the lowlands. It perhaps stems from the extreme lack of permanence or solidity in the landscape. It is evident in the way the land 6

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Nfuonline.com. 2020. [online] Available at: <https://www.nfuonline.com/assets/23991> [Accessed 25 November 2020].

Ibid.

Select Committee on Communities and Local Government Committee, 2008. Memorandum By Fenland District Council.

Thomas, J., Rahman, M., Davies, D. and Murray, C., 2020. Lower-Skilled EU Workers In Fenland: A View From The Ground Up | UK In A Changing Europe. [online] UK in a changing Europe. Available at: <https://ukandeu.ac.uk/lower-skilled-eu-workers-in- fenland-a-view-from-the-ground-up/> [Accessed 9 December 2020].

BBC News. 2020. EU Referendum Local Results. [online] Available at: <https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/politics/eu_referendum/results/local/a> [Accessed 10 December 2020].

Ibid.

Bolton, T. (2018). Low Country. London: Penned in the Margins.

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INFRASTRUCTURE AND LANDFORM AS MONUMENT What constitutes the contemporary Fennish identity? The Fens are a landscape constructed on memories. The history of control is crucial to the way the Fens are understood and used today. It is immortalised not only in its continuation through massive scale drainage to make the land arable but also through the monumentalising of landscape infrastructures of both the past and present.

A roddon is a ridge of earth or silt made from the raised bed of an old waterway.

The Fens are scattered with roddons left over primarily from Roman drainage infrastructure. Their height above the rest of the land makes them them points of dryness and therefore safety. They are also much more compacted meaning they provide firmer ground and so settlements are often found clustered along them.

Completely unforeseen by its original builders, this infrastructural landscaping has found a new use.

A familiar sight in lowland areas where you can see for miles and miles are power lines, industrial chimneys and cranes. These are part of what Richard Mabey describes as the new rural aesthetic which is defined by the traces of human activity left around the countryside.13 Power lines in particular act as directional markers and focal points in the otherwise flat landscape. They become a monument; a reminder of connectivity - a quality often felt lacking by Fenland inhabitants. Many feel alienated from hubs such as Cambridge, priced out of the city and pushed into the surrounding Fens.14 Transport infrastructure is not ideal making it difficult to travel between villages and into Cambridge especially if one does not drive. There is also a cultural divide between the city and its surrounding Fenlands. This can be seen most clearly by looking again to the results of the Brexit referendum. Cambridge voted 73.8% to remain and was one of only three Fenland districts to lean that way.

One of the most unique features of the Fens are the inland islands that punctuate the vast flatness. These are not actual islands but rather slightly higher ground - only rising up to around thirty metres above sea level - towards which settlements have gravitated throughout history. One such is the Isle of Ely with its famous cathedral towering over the Fens to be seen for miles. The oppressive monumentality of a religious spire is heightened by its raised geographical position and like the power lines and pylons it became a focal point in every line of vision, known locally as 13 14

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Mabey, R. (2010). The unofficial countryside. Dorchester: Little Toller Books.

Leishman, F., 2019. Why people in the Fens are getting angry about Cambridgeshire’s ‘cultural divide’. Cambridgeshire Live, [online] Available at: <https://www.cambridge- news.co.uk/news/local-news/forgotten-fens-speak-up-cambridgeshire-16081774> [Accessed 10 December 2020].

Aerial photograph showing a roddon running where a silted up extinct river used to run Cambridge Air Photos 15

‘the ship of the Fens’.

Perhaps one of the most poignant objects of memory in the Fens however are the Holme Fen posts. In 1848 an iron post was buried six metres deep in the ground in order to measure the peat shrinkage in one of the lowest areas of the Fens; Holme Fen. The bottom of the post was embedded in the clay layer underneath the peat.

Over the next hundred years the area was drained and the level of the soil sunk from the top to the bottom of the post at a rate of around two hundred and twenty millimetres a year. In 1957 a new post was inserted into the ground nearby in order to continue the process of tracking. However, rather than removing the now redundant original post, two steel ties were added in order to support it and keep it standing. The two posts are not only a form of measurement and a quantification of the quickly shrinking soil but they also provide a constant reminder of the ground that has been lost due to drainage. The addition of the steel ties was an act of conservation, making the post a monument to lost soil.

The memories of past and continuous efforts to colonise the Fennish landscape are materialised in the landform itself and in the remnants of the infrastructures that facilitate exploitation. As Ely is an island within the Fens, the Fens are an island within the rest of the UK. It is of no surprise that the Fennish were drawn to the insular mindset of the ‘Leave’ campaign, cut off from England, cut off from the United Kingdom, cut off from Europe.

Holme Fen Post WDIDB Collection 16

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Bibliography

Images

BBC News. 2020. EU Referendum Local Results. [online] Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/politics/eu_referendum/results/local/a> [Accessed 10 December 2020].

Cambridge Air Photos, 2017. Air Photo Of Roddon. [image] Available at: <https://twitter.com/ DrSueOosthuizen/status/940886841456283648/photo/1> [Accessed 10 December 2020].

Best, S., Sinclair, I., Willmoth, S. and Bode, S., 2008. Silicon Fen. London: Film and Video Umbrella.

Trolove, M., 2011. A Fen Blow Across Hod Fen Drove. [image] Available at: <https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2334642> [Accessed 10 December 2020].

Bolton, T. (2018). Low Country. London: Penned in the Margins.

Rowlandson, T., 1788. Ague And Fever. [Hand-coloured etching with aquatint].

Boyce, J., 2020. Imperial Mud : The Fight For The Fens. Icon Books, Limited.

WDIDB Collection, n.d. Holme Post. [image] Available at: <https://www.heritagesouthholland. co.uk/article/holme-post/> [Accessed 11 December 2020].

Leishman, F., 2019. Why people in the Fens are getting angry about Cambridgeshire’s‘cultural divide’. Cambridgeshire Live, [online] Available at: <https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/ local-news/forgotten-fens-speak-up-cambridgeshire-16081774> [Accessed 10 December 2020].

2009. Digging A Drain. [image] Available at: <http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/asset658496_14042-.html> [Accessed 11 December 2020].

Mabey, R. (2010). The unofficial countryside. Dorchester: Little Toller Books.

Nfuonline.com. 2020. [online] Available at: <https://www.nfuonline.com/assets/23991> [Accessed 25 November 2020].

Nicholls, A., Bhattacharya, S., Chakraborty, A., Alberts, T., Fauvel, A. and Yasuda, K., 2000.

Fenland ague in the nineteenth century. Medical History, 44(4), pp.513-530.

Pryor, F., 2020. The Fens. Head of Zeus.

Rotherham, I., 2013. The Lost Fens. Stroud: The History Press.

Select Committee on Communities and Local Government Committee, 2008. Memorandum By Fenland District Council.

The Ascoughs of East Fen. 2020. The Ascoughs Of East Fen. [online] Available at: <https:// theascoughsofeastfen.weebly.com/> [Accessed 15 November 2020].

Thomas, J., Rahman, M., Davies, D. and Murray, C., 2020. Lower-Skilled EU Workers In Fenland: A View From The Ground Up | UK In A Changing Europe. [online] UK in a changing Europe.

Available at: <https://ukandeu.ac.uk/lower-skilled-eu-workers-in-fenland-a-view-from-the-groundup/> [Accessed 9 December 2020].

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