#fenland

Soaring Kite

Wicken Fen, National Trust, February 2025

Wicken Fen is the only area of fenland in East Anglia that has never been drained, and so remains in a similar state as it has been since before human habitation.

A piece for Lammas this year. I don't subscribe to the Celtic calendar, but of course I subscribe to the concept of a harvest season. I seek above all my own words to describe my experiences.

Word vomit from last time I went back to visit my brother...

Honestly the atmosphere of the Fens gets under my skin every time. Driving through places like 'Three Holes' and 'Four Gotes' and 'New York' on roads that are a patchwork of tarmac trying to hold together enough of the constantly shifting land to make a way through, the ground undulating beneath the wheels so you're bouncing along like one half of a bickering couple on some boulevard in a black and white film. The brightest colour is that of discarded McDonald's packaging tumbling in the wind at the edge of the road. The red cardboard is fresh and new still, not faded like the red of the signs warning you that these roads have some of the highest death tolls in the country.

'Think, don't sink,' the signs tell you solemnly, and you notice the tilt of the road anew, the cracks in the surface, like volcanic rock, or the crust of a fresh, soft brownie - damn, you should have made some cake, Mum would have made some cake - and the deep ditch seems to tug at the edge of your vision as you try to focus on some point ahead, down the dagger-straight road.

How come there aren't any barriers there, then? It feels like a test. Or would the barriers simply subside into the ditch first, blocking it with metal cushioning, a nest for your wreck to settle upon?

What passes for hope round here appears in fits and starts: fields full of regimented glass houses, a site of 'brassica innovation'. And the farms that look like Antrim compounds, a Union Jack flying from every gatepost, just to remind you that while the land round about may feel unwelcoming, a thin veil of reclaimed ground, here on this site, within these sharpened fences, it's still good old Blighty.

(I'll take my chances with the mink and the grindylow out in the black fields, thanks)

Now and then a water tower - incongruous Soviet brutalism rising from the flat landscape like a bulbous grey tree or a UFO landing site - dwarfing the little Norman churches that will always look like the landscape of home. Roads that plunge between crop fields in monomaniacal straight lines, then jink and curve, pushed this way and that by the claims of landowners: farmers, yes, and the water that stalks all signs of human intervention here. And the most absurd railway crossing in the country, still manned by people in head-to-toe hi-vis, watching as a handful of cars at a time queue up between two lanes of traffic and the railway line, looking for a chance to reach the next village.