Notes on the Fenland; with A Description of the Shippea Man

by Thomas McKenny Hughes

It will be noticed that there is very little peat here and all of it was below O.D. The upper four feet of the clayey peat (f) looked as if the vegetable matter had been transported, perhaps from peat beds being destroyed by the river higher up, and been carried down in flood with the clay, while the lower four feet of peat (h) was only a cleaner sample of the same, before the river had cut down into the clay. The trees in both f and h were not trees that had grown on the spot and had been blown down, but were broken, water-worn, and evidently transported.

Fig. 4. Section seen in pit dug for material for making up the roadway east of the new bridge over the Ouse by the railway station. Ely, 1910.

If now we travel about 30 miles a little west of north we shall arrive near the shore of the Wash about half way across its southern coast line at Sutton Bridge. Here I had an opportunity of seeing the material of which the alluvium is composed. With a view to securing a sound base for the foundation of the piers of the Midland and Great Northern Railway bridge an excavation was made through the whole of the Fen Beds down to the Boulder Clay which as I have already stated was reached at a depth of 73 feet. The clerk of the works kindly gave me the following measurements (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Section seen at Sutton Bridge.

Here again we see that the only peat is a bed between three and four feet in thickness of mixed loam and peat more than 40 feet below mean sea level.

From these sections it is clear that along the direct and more permanent outfall from Cambridge to the north, peat forms but a small part of the Fen Beds.

Peat is a substance of so much value as fuel, of such importance to the agriculturist, of such commercial value in what we may call its by-products, and of such scientific interest in the history of its formation and the remains which its antiseptic properties have preserved, that it has, as might be expected, a large literature of its own.

I have before me a list of more than 150 references to peat or to the Fens.