an inner and an outer ring around London, and were intended to take the capital’s ‘surplus’ population, housing, entertaining and, most important of all, employing them. It was a major piece of social engineering: Peterborough’s population in 1968 was 80,000; today it is closer to 200,000.
I knew from my university courses that Peterborough was famous for its prehistoric archaeology. Indeed, one of those horrible pottery ‘cultures’ was even named after the place. We had been taught that Peterborough pottery and the Peterborough Culture played an important part in Later Neolithic Britain, around 2500 BC. I am still not at all sure what the Peterborough ‘Culture’ means or meant, but the term did at least suggest that sites in or near Peterborough had yielded important prehistoric finds. That was good enough for me. I determined to visit the place and see for myself. I didn’t know it then, but my quest was about to start in earnest. For the next quarter of a century I would barely have the time to draw breath.
Early autumn has a particular charm in England. Country gardens are at their best. Old-fashioned roses – the kind with loose flowers, kind colours and strong scents – are in their second flush, and even the midday sun lacks the strength to fade them. The true season of mists and mellow fruitfulness has yet to begin, and one is in a never-never world, where summer still lingers and the stillness of evening retains its warmth. It’s my favourite time of year: a little wistful perhaps, but not yet so much as a whisper of melancholy.
It was September 1970, and I was looking forward to the drive ahead of me. Norfolk is one of the most attractive counties in England. Noel Coward’s over-quoted ‘Very flat, Norfolk’ simply isn’t true: it’s a county of gently undulating hills, with little villages nestling in the valleys. By and large it’s an unspoiled county that has been spared the gentrification that has blighted many of the once-beautiful villages of the Cotswolds.
I decided not to take the direct route along the main road, but to let my car have its head, while I used the sun as a guide to ensure that I went in roughly the right direction. After half an hour, the rolling countryside gave way to the flat coastal plain of north Norfolk, and before I knew it I found myself driving through the beautiful ancient port of King’s Lynn.
Today the town is by-passed, and few people bother to divert from the traffic jams that are now an unavoidable part of summer weekends. The roads around King’s Lynn seize solid as the wealthy of the East Midlands migrate towards their seaside holiday homes in shiny four-wheel drives. Lynn is one of the most gorgeous towns of England. In medieval times it was prosperous, and the citizens built magnificent churches and whole streets of splendid timber-framed houses. The prosperity lasted into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but then there were harder times, and the town was spared the wholesale redevelopment that afflicted more prosperous places during the Industrial Revolution. Sadly, the worst damage to this jewel of the North Sea coast took place in the second half of the twentieth century – in the name of ‘improvement’.
King’s Lynn is the port on the river Great Ouse, at the point where it enters the Wash. East of the town is the higher ground of Norfolk, including the sandy countryside in which stands Edward VII’s grand country seat, Sandringham House. I once heard Prince Charles say that he always regarded himself as a Norfolk boy, thanks to the happy days he had spent in and around Sandringham.
To the west of Lynn, the landscape is altogether different. This is a less yielding, sterner country. The land is flat, and transected by deep drainage ditches. The roads run dead straight, and I soon found my car was travelling far faster than the police might have wished. I didn’t slow down, but roared onwards. This was the life!
I was back in the land of the Fens, a part of the world I have grown to love. I like its bleakness. I like its clear, luminous daylight. Above all, I feel free in the Fens: free to breathe deeply and be myself. I also like Fen people. True, they are reserved and rarely press their attentions on one; but I like that, too. There’s warmth aplenty when you need it, but only when you need it. They live in a landscape of space, and they give other people space too.
FIG 1 The Fens
The next town I came to was Wisbech (pronounced Wis-beach). Like Lynn, it had once seen prosperous times, but then the river Nene which was the source of the town’s wealth silted up, and the cargo ships which had brought loads of timber from the Baltic ports could no longer sail up the river from the Wash. As a result, Wisbech too was spared the depredations of our Victorian forebears. I wasn’t familiar with the town, and as I drove through its centre I was stunned by the fine Georgian houses which fringed the river along North Brink. I know now that this is possibly the finest Georgian streetscape in Britain.
Once I was out of Wisbech and heading west, the signs told me I was thirty-four miles from Peterborough. Again the landscape changed. Between Lynn and Wisbech the Fens are more accurately known as Marshland. The landscape I had sped through on leaving Lynn had been formed by the sea. Storms and tides from the Wash have laid down thick layers of sandy-coloured silts, which are now among the most fertile arable soils in Europe. It’s a countryside of orchards, rose and garden-plant nurseries, and vegetables. More vegetables are grown in Marshland than anywhere else in Britain. Sometimes the stench of frosted cauliflowers on the air can be overpowering.
West of Wisbech the Fens become different, and much darker. Spiritually darker too, I sometimes think. Before the widespread land drainage of the last three centuries, this was the haunt of Fen Tygers, those wild young men who wore their long hair in a pigtail and cherished their freedom to hunt and fish the common land and streams within their watery world. Out in the open fen there were huge expanses of water. Whittlesey Mere was the largest lake in Britain, before its drainage in 1852. Closer to the edge were sprawling woods of alder and willow. Here decomposing vegetation gave off methane gas, which spontaneously ignited to form the dreaded ‘corpse candles’ – which on drier land only formed in churchyards, above freshly filled graves. To outsiders it was a dark country in more ways than one.
The Black Fens acquired their name because of their rich peat soils, which formed in pre-drainage times in a wide natural basin between the silts of Marshland to the east, and the higher ground of the fen edge to the west. For thousands of years peat grew and accumulated in this complex network of ponds, lakes, meres and creeks. Before their drainage, which took place mainly in the seventeenth century, the Black Fens were Britain’s largest natural wetland. It was a drowned landscape, but it was also a rich land. There was peat for fuel, reeds for thatch and huge numbers of duck, geese, eels and fish to eat. Elsewhere, in upland Britain, folk went hungry in winter, when protein was always in short supply. But never in the Fens.
You can see a long way in a flat landscape. Perhaps the finest building in Britain, Ely Cathedral, high on its ‘island’ hill, can be seen from twenty miles away. Hence its local name, ‘the Ship of the Fens’. Peterborough Cathedral was built on lower-lying, less spectacular land, but it is still extremely impressive. These buildings were undoubtedly built to the glory of God, but the way they dominated – and still dominate – their landscapes leaves me in no doubt that they were also symbols of real political power down here on earth.
I first caught sight of Peterborough Cathedral from ten miles away, as I drove out of the little village of Thorney. By now I was back on the main road, as I had no idea how to navigate my way through the narrow Fen lanes. I knew from past experience that it’s easy to get almost there in the Fens. You follow your nose, and arrive close to your destination, except that there’s a huge drainage ditch (or dyke, as they’re known in the Fens) blocking the way. And then you discover that the nearest bridge is ten miles away.
Peterborough looked familiar as I drove towards the city centre. It was late afternoon and the sun was sinking behind the cathedral tower. Crows were calling to one another in the large trees of the Bishop’s Palace garden, as if they
