FENLAND IN THE 1920s

RE-WILDING THE FENS

MANAGEMENT FOR WILDLIF

_________________________________________________________

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.

___________________________________________________________

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.

____________________________________________________________

MANAGEMENT FOR WILDLIFE