Back Home in the Fens

It's just a week now since I got on that plane at Vancouver airport to come home after two months away in Canada. As much as I love seeing and being in the mountains when I'm on holiday I love to come back home to the Fens. You see I'm a born and bred Fenlander as were all my ancestors as far back as the 18th century. My direct line goes back to 1861 to a scandalous farmer and his housekeeper who farmed on the Deeping Fen in Lincolnshire. Other ancestoral lines have been traced in the back as far as the 1700's in the Fenlands.

This is the drove in Deeping Fen where my Gt. Gt. Gt. grandfather farmed It would have been like this in the 1860's The windmill hhave long gone now.

I love the big skies and the flat landscape. I love being near water. Maybe that's why we have a large pond in the garden! As a kid I use to sneak out in my wellies with a jam jar on a length of string to slash through the dyke's catching newts, tadpoles, stickelbacks and minnows. We would build bridges across the dykes from broken tree branches, build dams and mini ponds in the sticky smelly black sludge. In the winter when the dykes were full of water and frozen over I would don my fen skates and whizz along the frozen water hoping the ice would not give way. At that telltale creak and cracking we would jump onto the banks and scramble up them.

How times have changed. Winters are no longer cold and snowy with frost to ice ponds. kids no longer go off alone to have fun and adventures. Its now television and computer games that interest them most.

The Fens are a large area of flat and low lying wet lands in the east of England. They cover large areas of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. A great basin of low lying land surrounding the Wash on the East coast of England. Two thousand years ago they were wet marshy bogs and watery terrain, vast reed beds and an abundance of wildlife. The Romans were the first to attempt to drain the land and built the Fen Causeway recently excavated at Flag Fen the Bronze Age religious site found near Peterborough a few years ago. This followed by the Monks who inhabited the various Abbeys and monastery's built around the high points of the wet lands. Crowland had a large important abbey and monastery built on a raised natural gravel bed surrounded by marshes. Draining land to farm increased their revenues. In the 17th century the Dutch drainage engineers reclaimed land by digging drains and dyke's to drain the water from the land to drain it to the sea. During the Victorian times the progress was speeded up aided by the invention of steam driven water pumps and so the land scape changed. As the land devoid of its natural water dried out it shrank and the peat dried out. Valuable reed beds were lost as was the varied flora and fawner. Eel beds and fishing disappeared. Often the waterways that drained the land were higher than the surrounding fields. Agriculture on the highly fertile soil now became the main source of income for the Fen people.
These are just a few of my Fenlander ancestors. The little girl in the front is my mother. Shes almost 88 and the young guy cuddling the cat is my Uncle Jack . He's Mothers half brother, still chugging on at 94 and still looking after a cat. Mothers family eventually left the land and became builders, shoemakers, dressmakers, railway workers and a car mechanic. Oh and Uncle Jack became a Fireman. That's a Fire fighter to non Brits. My Fathers family stayed working the land until my generation when we all branched out into different occupations.