The Fens

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The Fens may also refer to the Back Bay Fens, a park in Boston, Massachusetts. See also Fen (disambiguation).

The Fens, also known as the Fenland, are an area of former wetlands in the eastern part of England, stretching along the coast of Lincolnshire to Kings Lynn and reaching into the counties of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk. These former wetlands consisted both of alkaline peat fen and silt freshwater and salt marshes which were drained in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The term The Fens is used for any or all of a series of connected former wetlands (and their surrounding communities) stretching around the whole of the coast of The Wash between Norfolk and Lincolnshire and up around Lincolnshire.

A rough map of the Fens
Enlarge
A rough map of the Fens

[1]

  • The Great Level of the Fens (later The Bedford Level, after the Earl of Bedford who headed the seventeenth century drainage), centred on the Isle of Ely and including the lower drainage basins of the Great Ouse and the River Nene,
  • The Deeping Level, in the southern part of Lincolnshire around the lower of the River Welland and the River Glen
  • The Lindsey Level, on the west side of the River Witham running from Lincoln to Boston, including the fens near Boston
  • The Wildmore and East and West Fens, on the east side of the River Witham, north of The Wash.

Some might also include the fen areas of northern Lincolnshire, such as the Isle of Axholme, as they share a similar environment and history, though they are not contiguous with the major fen areas around The Wash.[2]


Contents

[edit] Introduction

The Fens are very low-lying compared to the surrounding chalk and limestone "uplands" that surround them, in most places no more than 5-10m above sea level. Indeed, due to drainage and the subsequent shrinkage of the peat fens, many parts of the Fens now lie below sea level.

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", while 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 agricltural region.

Since the advent of modern drainage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Fens have be 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 canola.

The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica estimated 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.


[edit] 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 World's modern coasts.

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 generally, 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.

[edit] History

[edit] 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.[3].

[edit] 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.

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.

For about two hundred years after the English began to settle the Townland and the upland of East Anglia and Lincolnshire, there remained in the Fens themselves, a relict Celtic peoples[citation needed][4] The people were known as the Gyrwe, which name is likely to come from their word for "drovers" (compare Welsh gyrwyr).Gradualy the English Germanics and the Celts of the Fens mixed in with each other just like they did across the rest of England (apart from Cornwall and Cumbria) although it took over two hundred years. The cattle trade persisted well into the modern historical period as the means of livelihood in Crowland.

[edit] The Medieval Fenland

The earliest monastic settlements, distributed just inside The Fens appear to have arisen from the wish of English rulers to subvert the traditions of these people as a step towards controlling them. Beginning about the middle of the 7th century, the monks progressively built churches, monasteries and abbeys. They found themselves only moderately safe in the protection of the fens during the time of the Danish raids in the ninth and tenth centuries.

[edit] 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 disafforested 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 disafforestation was connected with the Magna Carta or one of its early thirteenth century re-statements, though it may have been as late as 1240. The Forest will have affected the economies of the townships around it and it appears that the present Bourne Eau was constructed at the time of the disafforestation, as the town seems to have joined in the general prosperity by about 1280.

[edit] Draining the Fens

[edit] 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.


[edit] 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.


[edit] 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.

[edit] 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".
  • 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

[edit] Setting in fiction

  • In Northern Lights (novel), by Philip Pullman, the Fens are home to the water-dwelling Gyptians, who hide the protagonist, Lyra, in the Fens. These Fens, however, are far larger than those is our world, and stretch right across the English Channel/North Sea and connect with the lowlands of the Netherlands.
  • 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.

[edit] References

  1. ^ After Keith Lindley, Fenland Riots (1982)
  2. ^ Keith Lindley's study Fenland Riots and the English Revolution included discussion of the Isle of Axholme and Hatfield Level along with the Lindsey Level and the Great Level, as they were politically very active during the Civil War period. Keith Lindley, The Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London: Heinnemann Educational Books, 1982).
  3. ^ Christopher Taylor, The Cambridgeshire Landscape (London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1973), 30.
  4. ^ *Early British Kingdoms: Close to AD700 St. Guthlac was pestered by the British aboriginal residents of Crowland.

[edit] External links

[edit] See also

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