Early morning and I’m out walking on the fens before the heat of the day ramps up. The sky glows vastly over a swaying ocean of sedges and reeds. Far up in the pale blue arch of the firmament, a marsh harrier surveys her reedy domain. A cuckoo is calling, echoing across the endless flat landscape, though as usual, I don’t see this enigmatic being; just the disembodied voice. Wicken fen, where I am, is a stronghold for cuckoos, though the middle of June is getting late in the season for a cuckoo to still be calling before they embark on their return journey back to the equatorial rainforest of the Congo.
The word fen has always had a magical quality to me, harking back to childhood tales of Hereward the Wake who, after the Norman Conquest a thousand years ago, led a sustained guerilla resistance from the fastness of the trackless fens. Fens are low lying flat, marshy lands, submerged for part of the year, and they used to be extensive in Eastern England before they were drained to make way for arable farming.
Between the reed and sedge beds, there are water channels, and the water is clear and surprisingly deep, tinted the amber of a well aged whiskey; the colour from the rich peat which underlies and nourishes this land. Water weeds like milfoils and hornwort spread luxuriantly in the underwater column, while both white and yellow water lilies grace the surface.
Shoals of rudd glide silently through this waterworld, their muscular bodies glinting golden with their characteristic deep red fins which give them the name we humans refer to them by. Just under the surface, little minnows flit about investigating everything around them, while whirligig beetles gyrate on the water film.
I feel pulled to the depths of the water, as if by an ancestral calling. I’m soothed and succoured by the richness of aquatic vegetation, by the water, and by the deep peat beneath. I feel utterly at home here and a part of this, complete.
I’m not from the fens yet this land resonates deeply with me in a mysterious way. I’ve always had an urge towards water, and a sitting spot feels to me incomplete without the element of water. Some are drawn to woods, some to mountains, others to the seashore, but for me, it’s always been freshwater and the lushness of waterside plants. For me, the margin between land and water has always had the most allure, and such transitional zones support the greatest biodiversity.
Kneeling down and gazing into the water, a wondrous underwater galaxy of life is revealed. Myriad small invertebrates of every description, dancing about; tiny crustaceans – daphnia and cyclops – jerkily swim while dragonfly nymphs stalk the depths and water beetles scurry about.
And everywhere in the air above the water, dragonflies and damselflies darting and chasing each other with acrobatic displays. Among the many species of these aerial predators in the fen, are Emperor Dragonfly, Hairy Dragonfly, and Emerald Damselfly. I walk through the fen with swifts and swallows hawking for insects in the sky above me. In the tall reeds, there is a cacophony of jangly song from small leaf warblers which are almost impossible to see as they seem very intent on remaining hidden in the reed beds. Eventually, by standing still for a quite a while, I spot a sedge warbler singing his heart out.
Many rare plant species find a home in this undrained oasis and there are many which I am not familiar with – like marsh pea, fen violet and marsh fern. Wicken Fen has been well studied by biologists and it is estimated that there are something in the order of 9000 identified species just here. It may well be home to the greatest biodiversity anywhere in the whole British Isles.
In the past, there were fenlands all along the East coast of England, though the East Anglian fens, (where Wicken fen is) were by far the largest. For hundreds, if not thousands of years, right up until the 1600s, it was a vast natural area of low lying marsh and swamps, which flooded in winter. Wildlife thrived in the reed marshes and wet woodland, plants and insects flourished on the peat soils, and in the open water fish and birds were abundant. The local indigenous people relied on fishing, wildfowling, the harvesting of reeds and sedge for thatching, cutting peat for fuel, coppicing willow, and wet grazing on drier areas.
This relative harmony was shattered when outside landowners and investors brought over Dutch engineers, starting from the early 1600s; these engineers had the expertise and technology to drain the fens with windpumps, so that the drained rich peat soil could be repurposed for agriculture. Gradually, over the next couple of hundred years, the huge fenlands were largely destroyed, despite fierce opposition from the fen dwellers, whose livelihoods were utterly dependent on this watery realm. In this way the natural wilderness of the fens was transformed into endless miles of intensive farmland.
Ian Rotherham in his book, The Lost Fens (2013), describes this as the “greatest single ecological catastrophe that ever occurred in England”. The extraordinary richness of life in the 7000 sq km of the original fenland can be imagined from historical accounts of its spectacular abundance.
The fens were replaced by arable land now owned by wealthy strangers. The ‘Fen Tigers’ mounted sustained resistance, tearing down dykes and destroying the wind pumps used for draining the land, but they couldn’t halt the destruction. Wicken fen was one of the only fragments of this ancient landscape to be saved because of the rioting of the local Wicken inhabitants. Later, Victorian naturalists came to recognise the wildlife value of this remaining fen fragment of Wicken fen and it was bought for preservation by the National Trust in 1898, becoming their first nature reserve.
There’s a persistent unhelpful notion that wild lands for conservation or rewilding should be devoid of human inhabitants. But actually, taking the fens as an example, it’s been shown that there is more biodiversity in the areas where sedges are cut; traditionally the fen people over many centuries helped maintain a precious habitat for all life. They enabled a community of plants and animals to thrive who depended for their survival on regular clearance of the sedge. Human beings are an intrinsic part of nature and we are learning from many parts of the world how indigenous peoples have always played an important role in the sustainability of forests such as the Amazon. They have shaped forest composition and its diversity in healthy ways, playing a key role in the protection of ecosystems for millennia.
Konik ponies, a beautiful dun coated and very hardy breed of pony, have now been introduced to drier parts of the fen to prevent scrub from taking over, as a part of the management plan.
Konik ponies on Wicken fen
More areas are now being purchased and restored to fenland, and in a nearby area there is a vision for linking up surviving wetlands into what is known as The Great Fen. When the fens were drained, the peat dried up and continued to shrink, causing the level of the land to keep dropping below sea level and ironically to cause it to be more susceptible to flooding. Rewetting peatland is now being seen as a valuable way to reduce carbon emissions and help prevent flooding. That is because wet peat sequesters carbon, but when peat is drained and farmed, it emits about nineteen times as much carbon as non-peat cropland.
The ghosts of fens past still linger in the flatlands of East Anglia. Hiking the paths across Wicken fen, I can feel the spirit of the fens, an ancient land which wants to be itself, to drink deeply its fill of water again, to swell and rehydrate, and to be wild.
A rustle in the sedge and I glimpse the flash of the white rump of a deer as it disappears into the tall reeds, leaving unbroken greenness in its wake.
