The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway

by Charles G. Harper

XXXI

Cambridgeshire is a singularly stoneless country, and in the Fens there is not so much as a pebble to be found. Thus it has become a common jest of the Cambridgeshire farmers to offer to swallow all the stones you can pick up in their fields. Farm horses for this reason are never shod, and it sounds not a little strange and uncanny to see one of the great waggon-horses plodding along a Fenland "drove," as the roads are named, and to hear nothing but the sound of his bells and the indistinct thudding of his shoeless feet in the dust or the mud, into whichever condition the weather has thrown the track.

A Fenland road is one thing among others peculiar to the Fens. It is a very good illustration of eternity, and goes on, flat and unbending, with a semi-stagnant ditch on either side, as far as eye can reach in the vast solitary expanse, empty save for an occasional ash-tree or group of Lombardy poplars, with perhaps a hillock rising in the distance crowned by a church and a village. No "metal" or ballast has ever been placed on the Fenland drove. In summer it is from six to eight inches deep in a black dust, that rises in choking clouds to the passage of a vehicle or on the uprising of a breeze; in winter it is a sea of mud, congealed on the approach of frost into ruts and ridges of the most appalling ruggedness. The Fen-folk have a home-made way with their execrable "droves." When they become uneven they just harrow them, as the farmer in other counties harrows his fields, and, when they are become especially hard, they plough them first and harrow them afterwards; a procedure that would have made Macadam faint with horror. The average-constituted small boy, who throws stones by nature, discovers something lacking in the scheme of creation as applied to these districts. Everywhere the soil is composed of the ancient alluvial silt brought down to these levels by those lazy streams, the Nene, the Lark, the Cam, and the Ouse, and of the dried peat of these sometime stagnant and festering morasses. Now that drainage has so thoroughly done its work, that in ardent summers the soil of this former inland sea gapes and cracks with dryness, it is no uncommon sight to see water pumped on to the baking fields from the leams and droves. The earth is of a light, dry black nature, consisting of fibrous vegetable matter, and possesses the well-known preservative properties of bog soil. Thus the trees of the primeval forest that formerly existed here, and were drowned in an early stage of the world's history, are often dug up whole. Their timber is black too, as black as coal, as may be seen by the wooden bridges that cross the drains and cuts, often made from these prehistoric trees.

Here is a typical dyke. Its surface is richly carpeted with water-weeds, and the water-lily spreads its flat leaves prodigally about it; the bright yellow blossoms reclining amid them like graceful naiads on fairy couches. But the Fenland children have a more prosaic fancy. They call them "Brandy-balls." The flowering rush, flushing a delicate carmine, and the aquatic sort of forget-me-not, sporting the Cambridge colours, are common inhabitants of the dykes; and in the more stagnant may be found the "water-soldier," a queer plant without any roots, living in the still slime at the bottom until the time comes for it to put forth its white blossoms, when it comes to "attention" in the light of day, displays its fleeting glory, and then sinks again, "at ease," to its fetid bed. There is a current in the dykes, but the water flows so imperceptibly that it does not deflect the upstanding spikes of the daintiest aquatic plant by so much as a hair's-breadth. Indeed, it would not flow at all, and would merely stagnate, were it not for the windmill-worked pumps that suck it along and, somewhere in the void distance, impel it up an inclined plane, and so discharge it into the longer and higher drain, whence it indolently flows into one of the canalised rivers, and so, through a sluice, eventually finds its way into the sea at ebbtide.

The means by which the Fens are kept drained are not without their interest. A glance at a map of Cambridgeshire and its neighbouring counties will show the Great Level to be divided up into many patches of land by hard straight lines running in every direction. Some are thicker, longer, and straighter than others, but they all inter-communicate, and eventually reach one or other of the rivers. The longest, straightest, and broadest of these represents that great drain already mentioned, the Old Bedford River, seventy feet wide and twenty-one miles long; cut in the seventeenth century to shorten the course of the Ouse and to carry off the floods. Others are the New Bedford River, one hundred feet in width, cut only a few years later and running parallel with the first; Vermuyden's Eau, or the Forty Foot Drain, of the same period, feeding the Old Bedford River from the Nene, near Ramsey, with their tributaries and counter-drains. The North Level cuts belong principally to the early part of the nineteenth century, when Rennie drained the Wisbeach and Lynn districts.

A WET DAY IN THE FENS.

The main drains are at a considerably higher level than the surrounding lands, the water in them only prevented from drowning the low-lying fields again by their great and solid banks, fourteen to sixteen feet high, and about ten feet in breadth at the top. These banks, indeed, form in many districts the principal roads. Perilous roads at night, even for those who know them well, and one thinks with a shudder of the dangers encountered of old by local medical men, called out in the darkness to attend some urgent case. Their custom was—perhaps it is in some places still observed—to mount their steady nags and to jog along with a lighted stable-lantern swinging from each stirrup, to throw a warning gleam on broken bank or frequent sunken fence.

At an interval of two miles along these banks is generally to be found a steam pumping-engine, busily and constantly occupied in raising water from the lodes and dykes in the lower levels and pouring it into the main channel. The same process is repeated in the case of raising the water from the field-drains into the smaller dykes by a windmill or "skeleton-pump," as it is often called. It is a work that is never done, but goes forward, year by year, and is paid for by assessments on the value of the lands affected by these operations. Commissioners, themselves local landowners and tenants, and elected by the same classes, look after the conduct and the efficiency of the work, and see that the main drains are scoured by the "scourers"; the banks duly repaired by the "bankers" and the "gaulters"; the moles, that might bring disaster by burrowing through them, caught by the "molers"; and the sluices kept in working order. The rate imposed for paying the cost of these works is often a heavy one, but the land is wonderfully rich and productive. Nor need the Fenland farmer go to extraordinary expense for artificial manure, or for marling his fields when at length he has cropped all the goodness out of the surface soil. The very best of restoratives lies from some five to twelve feet under his own land, in the black greasy clay formed from the decaying vegetable matter of the old forests that underlie the Fens. A series of pits is sunk on the land, the clay obtained from them is spread over it, and the fields again yield a bounteous harvest.