The Fens Talking Landscapes

I set out to understand some of the great landscapes of Britain,

to piece together the history that shaped them.

This is one of the most perplexing - the Fens.

A million acres of flat farmland, much of it below sea level.

Without thousands of canals, rivers and drains, it would disappear completely into marsh and mudflat.

It looks like an entirely man-made landscape.

The puzzle is - when was it made?

In one great feat of engineering? Or over thousands of years?

There's reclaimed and drained land throughout Britain, but nothing on the scale of the Fens.

They're in a great arc around the Wash.

It's a landscape as flat as the eye can see.

It's full of geometric patterns - straight lines of drainage ditches, right angles of fields.

It's like something off a drawing board. My first question is -

did this just grow up piecemeal through the centuries? Or was there ever a grand plan?

I went to Wisbech, to the museum.

I met Tom Williamson, a landscape historian working in East Anglia.

We looked out one of the earliest maps of the area, dating from 1631.

It shows that the Fens had not yet been drained.

This was a great, huge area of bog?

Yes, it's peat fen. Much of it would be flooded, certainly in winter -

reed beds, sedge beds, some grazing, a huge great common, really, teeming with life.

There's the Wash. This is this great area of peat fen, into which you have a series of rivers,

feeding from the Midlands and East Anglia - Cam, here,

-the Ouse and the Nene.

-At what point did they start to drain?

There were sporadic attempts in medieval times, but the big drainage was in the 17th century.

How did they do it? Did they get in a great drainage expert?

Yes, a bloke called Vermuyden. Francis, the 4th Duke of Bedford,

and some financial backers called "adventurers" because they ventured their capital on the enterprise,

they employed a Dutch engineer called Vermuyden - people pronounce it different ways.

But his view was quite simple really.

The rivers all feed into here. They're sluggish and meander around

with silt deposits in their beds.

Their outfalls get choked. They're too sluggish and if you don't speed them up, they'll take the water

-across this peat fen quickly and out through to the North Sea into the Wash.

-And carry the silt.

They'll be self-clearing channels.

So there really was a great plan.

In the 1630s, they think they can drain and develop the whole lot.

The great plan was to straighten out the silty rivers and then drain the land into them,

dividing it up into rectangular blocks for the adventurers.

The centre of the whole system was Vermuyden's new cut for the Ouse, named the Bedford River,

after the Fourth Duke, chief of the adventurers.

-Is this it?

-That's right. 1637 that was completed.

-God!

20 miles long.

20 miles dead straight. It'd be a major engineering achievement today.

Yeah. This was done with guys with spades and pickaxes and wheelbarrows.

It's a phenomenal thing. It takes a lot of the water of the Ouse so that it doesn't go meandering around.

It comes straight, speeding up the flow and preventing inundation, particularly in winter.

But the adventurers' grand plan ran into trouble. This had been common land

and local Fensmen resented the way it was being privatised by outside speculators.

And it wasn't long before the land started to flood again.

Once Vermuyden's cut was running, the Fens were drained, were they?

They were declared drained, but that's not the same thing. Flooding continued in many parts.

There wasn't enough capacity in these drains to get the water through and there was opposition, sabotage

and vandalism of the drainage works by the local commoners.

Then everything stopped for a while because of the Civil War. Then, in 1650-51, Vermuyden's back

-and they dig this, the new river bed.

-Good heavens!

-It's even bigger.

-Monstrous! 20 miles again?

Yeah, parallel with the other. Doesn't silt up. Thousands of gallons pouring through it.

-And this IS still working?

-Yes, it's the main arterial drainage channel for the peat fens.

-350 years and it's working.

-Yeah.

-So this was the Fens finally drained?

That's what they thought. But they were wrong. Come on, I'll show you.

What Vermuyden and the others hadn't realised was, as they drained the peat, it gradually shrinks.

It shrinks cos the water's removed and as it's ploughed, the peat surface desiccates and blows off.

-It falls and falls and falls.

-How did they get the water up?

-The land must be ten metres below...

-That's the most striking thing about the Fenland landscape.

All the rivers stand up above the farmland.

When you get to the late-17th, early-18th century, they have to pump the water from these lower levels

over this bank into the drain.

Where that house stands is the site of one of the wind pumps.

-There were two, one after the other, in steps.

-To bring it up in stages?

Yes, sometimes there were three. All this area, you'd have seen hundreds, particularly on these main banks.

Absolutely full of them.

Then, in the 19th century, those are replaced by these -

by steam pumps.

And did the land go on shrinking?

The land goes on shrinking, but the steam pumps are gradually replaced by more modern technology,

-which we have here.

-Great diesel.

The adventurers' investment straightened out and speeded up the rivers

so that the land could be drained into them and shared out.

But for 300 years, the peat's been drying, decaying and disappearing.

In some places, it's ten metres below its original level.

It was too much for the wind and steam pumps. What about modern ones?

You really have got a demonstration of the levels, haven't you?

There's the windmill up there, then the steam pump, then the diesel,

-and the latest - the electric pump at the bottom.

-Yes.

-How much longer can this go on?

-Not much longer.

Down here, we've got the peat soil.

As you rummage around, you find, in places, they're ploughing through into the clay.

-Down to the bedrock.

-Effectively, that's right.

Whereas peat is wonderfully fertile - as anyone buying it from the garden centre knows - this stuff is not.

So the amount of effort and money put in to keep this dry is not going to be viable eventually.

If you turn that thing off, within a few months, this will be under water.

-The Fens come back.

-The Fens come back.

The adventurers' grand design may be near the end of its life.

I tried to imagine what the Fens would be like if they came back.

I remembered how the Fensmen sabotaged the original drainage.

What had been so attractive about a bog?

I asked archeologist Ben Robinson and he took me to Wood Walton,

a few acres that have amazingly survived.

It looks to us a very beautiful, restful place, but presumably they thought it was wasted ground.

Not at all. It's got everything you need to sustain life.

These meres would have been shallow. The medieval fen would be stuffed full of fish and eels.

The reeds were harvested for building materials, the peat was cut for fuel. Woodland fringes this area,

which again was used for fuel and building, so it's full of resources.

We talk about biodiversity and rainforest, but fenland had it all.

-You make it sound as if they lived rather well.

-Yeah.

The monasteries carved up the whole fenland region among themselves...

-And grow rich on it.

-Yes, Ely ended up amongst the richest monasteries.

I could see now why the Fensmen sabotaged the great drainage.

In the Middle Ages, these were among the richest lands in England.

But wherever did they live?

Ben, who turned out to be a man of many parts, took me to see. Medieval Fensmen lived on islands.

There's a small fen island down there sticking up from the fen floor.

-It's surrounded by a drain.

-It does look like an island.

-That's right.

Exactly. An entirely different sort of field on top of the island there.

You can see most of the houses on the ridge on the firm ground,

surrounded by rectangular reclamation fields.

-It would flood on each side. There'd be reed beds.

-The fringes would be surrounded by seasonally flooded land

which might have been taken in for summer pasture.

There'd be reed bed further out and then a few meres. It would have stuck out as somewhere quite different.

There'd be orchards on some of these medieval islands, even vineyards.

-Really?

-On ones owned by monasteries. They really looked different.

It's very clear down there.

Before the great drainage of the 17th century, the Fen was a vast expanse of waterways and bog,

rich in reeds, rushes, summer grass and wildlife.

Its people lived on islands which they ploughed and cultivated -

a rare and rich way of life.

So the Fens aren't just a 17th-century landscape.

Medieval villages and fields survive if you know how to see them.

I drove north looking for other old fenland landscapes.

I'd almost reached the Wash when I hit a string of villages, each with a fine medieval church.

Whaplode, Fleet, Holbeach - old names.

And the landscape looks rather different - the fields are smaller, the soil is paler.

Is it possible this is another ancient landscape surviving in the Fens?

Along both sides of this narrow strip of old villages,

I noticed a succession of high banks snaking through the landscape,

most of them topped with roads.

It looked like these villages had built banks to keep the water back.

I asked Tom Lane, a fenland archaeologist.

When these villages were built, they must have been on quite a narrow strip of land.

It couldn't have been more than a mile and a half across.

It's almost like existing on a sandbank really.

They were really on the edge of the sea, I suppose.

They were in danger of going UNDER the sea. That's why these banks were so important.

At one time, the Wash continually flooded this area, reaching far inland.

That's why the soil is light and silty. The villagers built banks to keep the water away from their land.

From the air, you can see the banks, because now they have roads on top.

Tom said the oldest were to landward, built out into the Fen.

The first bank was built by Domesday - by 1086.

It's the one down there that's so wiggly.

That's because it was built in small lengths -

the Whaplode people, the Holbeach people, the Gedney people -

each doing their contribution - a fantastic community effort.

-That's good soil, isn't it?

-Silt soil is the most fertile in Britain.

That's why they were so successful when they made the banks. Initially, it was for protection,

but it worked as reclamation. They ploughed it because it was fertile.

We're also quickly coming up to the third one, which is called Hassock Dyke, 1180 this one.

It's just a straight line. There's actually one more, a common dyke,

which is built round about 1215

or into the mid-13th century.

Brilliant little system.

As the silty soil behind the banks dried, it turned out to be even more valuable than the Fen.

So between about 1050 and 1250, these villages built more and more banks and reclaimed 90 square miles.

They crossed their new land with drove roads for cattle to graze the peaty fen beyond.

It's another surviving medieval landscape.

So successful were the banks, that from the 13th or 14th century,

the villagers built them on the other side, out towards the sea.

And here they've been building them ever since.

We threaded between the banks along the River Nene, towards the Wash.

Once, it was just an open landscape, miles and miles of salt marsh.

-They made salt here.

-Sea salt was a huge industry in the Wash area in medieval times and before.

So the sea banks changed it all.

What happened was that people were able to reclaim land further and further out.

-When this lighthouse was built, this was the end of the land.

-On the sea?

-Right on the sea.

-So people have been winning back the land through the ages.

"Winning back the land" is the right phrase - over a very long period.

This medieval landscape of dykes and drove roads stretches almost all around the edge of the Wash.

Fensmen had after all been reclaiming little sections of land

before the great 17th-century plan.

I began to wonder how far back in time this piecemeal fen drainage went.

It's an astonishing thought that that's an ancient drove road

and some of these banks and ditches date back more than 1,000 years.

But people here will tell you the Romans started all this off.

So the next question is -

was it the Romans who first drained the Fens?

Everyone told me that the person to ask about Romans is Rog Palmer.

He's a photographer in Cambridge, using aerial photographs to map out faint traces of Roman remains.

What I'm doing is drawing out the archeological features I can see.

We can see some of the enclosures here, which would have been settlement enclosures or for stock.

A linear feature there which doesn't look like a track, but might be.

Most of what I'm seeing here are the ditches from former settlements and occupation.

So these are actually Roman? We've got Romans living in the Fens?

What we see on the Fens is Iron-Age peasants carrying on being peasants,

but under Roman government, if you like. These aren't Romans in togas.

Roger's photographs are oblique views from the side of a plane.

He straightens his tracings up by computer, then plots them on a map.

Piece by piece, he's been building a complete picture of Roman settlements in the Fens.

One thing that strikes the eye is this great string here.

They're all the way along in this line. Was it a main road they built?

No, these settlements were on the high and dry ground,

which were the silted beds of old rivers which we call "roddens" now.

-So this was a pattern of high ground at the time?

-Yes.

The rodden was a river in Neolithic times,

which has silted up since then and the silt is hard and compact

and doesn't compress as much as the peat does.

So the rodden stands in places two metres above the ground surface.

-This is the pattern of settlements here?

-Yes, they were on the roddens.

It's amazingly precise, isn't it?

-Well...

-It's astonishing.

So the Romans didn't drain the Fens. They didn't need to do so.

They used the high ground, yes, with no drainage.

The Romans didn't drain the Fens - they lived on the dry roddens.

But as the Roman Empire fell, the water table rose and the roddens and settlements disappeared.

Now the peat has shrunk, the roddens are back - strange humps in the landscape.

But the rest of the Roman world is gone.

Makes you wonder whether that is the end of the story.

Well, it's an amazing thing that Francis Pryor, at Flag Fen,

has discovered not only earlier settlements, but a whole earlier landscape.

Francis took me to a drove road, one reconstructed from his archeological evidence.

It dates back to long before the Romans.

At about two and a half thousand years BC, there were huge flocks of animals around here...

-So we're talking 4,000-5,000 years ago?

-Yes, the early Bronze Age.

-This was a pastoral economy.

-Yes, a very specialised pastoral economy.

As you can see by this. This is a specialised land-management feature, this Bronze-Age road.

It's on a grand scale, this great roadway here.

There were loads of these roadways, where people took their animals.

-This extends over a large area of the Fens here.

-Yeah.

Absolutely soaking wet. What did they do? Did they drain the land?

No, it wasn't soaking wet. It was dry.

-This was dry land?

-In the Bronze Age.

The fens around here STARTED to form about 2000 BC.

-So the Fens were dry?

-There WERE wet patches, but not the huge expanses of peat that formed later.

I wanted to know how Francis could be so sure this landscape was first flooded during the Bronze Age.

He took me to the remains of a timber platform he'd discovered.

It was built about 1300 BC, late in the Bronze Age.

Francis's theory is that it stood right through the years when this land passed from bone dry to fen.

In the early Bronze Age, this would have been just getting a bit boggy.

Then the water slowly crept up, inch by inch. Every winter, the flooding got worse and worse.

And that's why those posts have survived as high as they do.

If they hadn't been wet to the top of the post, none of that wood would have survived.

-This was a platform, a walkway?

-And much more than that.

I imagine this line of posts was a sort of symbolic wall against the incoming waters -

a King Canute effect. So they come to the posts to make their offerings

-at the posts.

-What sort of offerings?

-Valuable offerings - bronze swords,

daggers, spearheads. They're actually sending a message to the ancestors,

saying, "Keep back, water."

Because it's the ancestors who they believed controlled the elements like flooding and storms.

-Then we have a picture of this landscape changing over time...

-Slow change was from about 2000-3000 BC,

as the land slowly began to get flooded.

Then the flooding got worse and worse and about 1000 BC, it was really serious.

So that when the Romans came here in 43 AD, this part of the Fen was just water.

It's all very well as theory, but could I dig up any evidence

to show exactly how dry fields had been transformed into a bog of peat and silt?

Charlie French is a soil specialist. He's studied a prehistoric land surface, uncovered during quarrying

near the River Ouse, on the western edge of the Fens.

How far back in time does this cut take us?

What we're looking at is an old ground surface that was used until about the last 3,000 years.

So from here to here, if I clean this off,

we've actually got a buried soil,

so where you see this mottled grey and orange sitting on top of terraced sands and gravels.

-It was dry at this time.

-Yeah, very much a dry-land situation with woodland and trees.

Eventually it becomes subsumed. You see these darker deposits here - a mixture of freshwater peat,

which is coming in from the Fens with rising water tables,

mixed with freshwater silts and clays, this blocky material here,

which comes inland from Bedfordshire and so on, spreading out over this

and getting that combination of two flows - one from inland, one from the Fens to the east.

So when the Fens were first flooded, water came from two directions.

It's a story Charlie has pieced together by examining fenland soils under the microscope.

Water was coming from one direction because, 5,000 years ago,

melting ice from the last ice age was raising the sea level, flooding the area around the Wash.

As the land became boggier, the first peat began to form.

By the later Bronze Age, we have a great swathe of peat,

3,000 years ago, running up these major channel systems like the Ouse,

where we actually get peat formation or the build-up of organic remains.

The whole slide, as you might expect, dominated by organic matter.

'But then something else began to happen, which clogged up and spread out the rivers coming from inland.'

At the same time, in Bedfordshire, Leicestershire and Hertfordshire,

-we get clearance on thick, heavy soil for the first time.

-Felling?

-Yes, ploughing for the first time.

New sediment - clay and silt - gets into the water system, as we've seen on these slides.

Here, where we get fantastic silt and clay through the whole system.

-Masses of silt coming down those rivers.

-And, of course, it can't get out to the sea.

It spreads out, ponds back against that peat.

The material finally settles out of suspension in still-water conditions

And the water is locked in that great basin. There's an irony here.

We think of human action destroying the Fens, but your work shows that 5,000 years ago,

human activity helped create the Fens.

It was human exploitation of a wide catchment area around the system

which contributes to the formations we see today.

So water flooded this land from two directions - it came from the sea

and also from the slow, silty rivers clogged by the first farmers ploughing heavy soils in the west,

the same rivers the great drainage engineers would struggle to speed up 4,000 years later.

Before I left, I went back to that steam pump on the Bedford River.

I saw that this drained landscape is just a short episode in the history

of the way we've moulded these vast, flat acres.

I first saw the Fens as a man-made landscape, with its straight ditches and right-angled fields,

and it's true - it IS a man-made landscape, but in a way totally unexpected to me.

People thousands of years ago in middle England felled and cultivated and brought the silt down.

They created the Fens.

But the Fens are coming to another turning point in their history

because, after three centuries of drainage and cultivation, the peat's almost all gone

The bedrock clay is coming out.

It may not be economic to continue pumping.

It's an extraordinary thought that perhaps the waters will come back

and the reed beds, the willow, the alder and wildfowl will return,

just like in the Middle Ages.

Subtitles by Roger Young BBC Scotland - 2000

E-mail us at [email protected]