Pryor - The fens: discovering Englands ancient depths

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

This is an Apollo book, first published in the UK in 2019

by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright Francis Pryor, 2019

The moral right of Francis Pryor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781786692221

ISBN (E): 9781786692238

Design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Painting: Winter evening in the Black Fens, courtesy of Fred Ingrams www.fredingrams.com

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For Chris Evans, Mark Knight and the field team of the Cambridge University Unit for the superb quality of their excavations at Bradley Fen and Must Farm.

A view from the Wash sea bank at Lawyers Creek, near Holbeach St Matthew, Lincolnshire. This is the point, at the mouth of the River Welland, where the Wash shoreline swings sharply east to head towards Gibraltar Point and Skegness, on the east coast. The sea bank is turning east on the left of this picture. This land only floods during spring tides or winter storm surges. In the foreground are tidal creeks and salt marsh. Far in the distance, over a mile away, are the tidal muds of the Wash foreshore.

Time and space are eclipsed by the sea. Nothing has greater power to transport me away from the here and now than the sight, and gently rhythmical sound, of waves breaking on the foreshore. I stood staring at the scene before me for several minutes before the scream of a low-flying jet fighter from the nearby RAF Holbeach ranges brought me rudely back to reality. I was standing on a sea bank, roughly at the mid-point of the Wash shoreline, in rural south Lincolnshire, near the little village of Gedney Drove End.

To my left, the sea lapped against the muddy banks of a flooded tidal creek and to my right was a vast expanse of water that was neither sea nor lake: no beach, no bulrushes, no water lilies just huge tracts of silty muds dissected by creeks and covered with irregular mats of tough, springy vegetation, edged with spreads of marsh samphire. Every so often there was a patch of soft quicksand. Land birds, seagulls and waders were everywhere, and their ceaseless calls and shrill cries were an essential part of the scene.

Behind and below me the picture was very different. Beyond the concrete pillboxes, machine-gun posts and other wartime coastal defences, with their decaying pebbly concrete thickly cloaked with brambles, the land was lower lying than the Wash shores. It was intensively farmed and had very fertile pale brown soil, with a few trees and fields of vegetables, potatoes, flowers and wheat. But it was a smaller, older and more irregular landscape than the great peaty Black Fens 20 miles (32 km) to the south-west. For these were the marshland or Silt Fens, where roads often meandered and many parish churches were medieval. Huge, rounded mounds of silty soil betrayed the remains of salterns, where people in the Middle Ages had heated sea water to extract salt. In the middle distance, some 5 miles (8 km) due west, I could clearly see the magnificent ancient steeples of Long Sutton and Holbeach churches. Closer to where I stood, the larger Victorian farmhouses had an air of Georgian elegence. But nowhere could I see so much as a hint of a hill, nor a glimpse of upland even on the most distant horizon. It was here that I first began to appreciate the vastness of the Fens one million acres.

These two distinct and contrasting worlds were separated by the sea bank on which I stood. That grassy artificial bank was all that protected the land behind me from total and rapid annihilation by a major marine flood. It was a threatened landscape whose uncertain future seemed to demand introspection. And I wasnt struck dumb with awe at my insignificance, as happened when I first came face to face with Niagara Falls. No, this time my perception was somehow more measured, if less assured.

The views from the bank were certainly comprehensive: they extended uninterrupted to the horizon for three hundred and sixty degrees, but I was not confronting them as a puny individual, for I was standing on something created by people. Nor was I above them, looking down from a tall hill or mountain, master of all I surveyed. There was nothing obviously melodramatic or awe-inspiring about the place, like Niagara or the Grand Canyon. It was quietly sublime. It was then that it came to me that I was an essential part of it. I had acquired a profound sense of place: I now knew where I stood, not just on this sea bank but in the world and in my life. It was a feeling I have never lost and I think it explains why the Fens have become so central to my existence.

I am in little doubt that I would be a rich man if every person who told me that the Fens were very flat and boring had then given me 5. Sadly, its a widespread opinion, born of ignorance and a growing modern inability to look any further than the landscape thats flashing past the train or car window. But get people in the carriage around you to raise their heads from their smartphone screens when you start to draw into Ely station. Eyes widen and children grab at their mothers sleeves to get their attention: Mum, whats THAT?

Theres no building like Ely Cathedral anywhere in Europe, and the small town that nestles around it is as charming and atmospheric as any in Britain. I shall address that often-heard boring criticism as this book progresses. But what about flat? Yes, the Fens are somewhat short of mountains, and indeed, the hill in Ely may seem modest compared with those beneath the great cathedrals at Durham or Lincoln, but when viewed from the low-lying plains that surround the isle, it acquires the mystical prominence of a Mount Olympus.

This is the story of my personal discovery, as both archaeologist and farmer, of Britains most distinctive, fragile and ultimately man-made landscape. The books structure is essentially chronological, in a historical sense, but its also chronological in a personal sense. And somehow I want to try and mesh these two components together as happened in real life, when I began to discover and appreciate the complex story of the Fens. And it has been a fascinating process of discovery, both of landscape, history and, indeed, of self. I sometimes wonder who, or what, triggered my thoughts all those years ago, as I stood on that sea bank overlooking the Wash. It felt somehow external, but I was almost certainly wrong. Of course, Ill never know the truth; but Im just so grateful that it happened.

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The Fens lie on Englands east coast, just under halfway between the English Channel and the Scottish border, and immediately above the large bulge of East Anglia. Today the Fens comprise about a million acres of low-lying ground that forms what is essentially an inland extension of the Wash, Englands largest bay. Several substantial rivers, principally the Witham, Welland, Nene and Great Ouse, flow through the Fens on their way to the Wash and thence the North Sea. Much of the story of human life in the Fens centres around the use, then the management, and ultimately the control of those rivers.