The Fens

Today, we dig into Hereward the Wake, the Fenland rebel who challenged William the Conqueror.

What can the records really tell us about his revolt and its impact? Picture the flat expanse of the Fens in Eastern England, a network of marshes and peat flats that made travel as tricky as navigating a sea of reeds.

The people living there were tied to the land by a kind of rugged, agrarian community life that had survived since Saxon times, with its own traditions of local lordship and shared rights over common pasture.

Hereward the Wake rose from this milieu, not from some great court, but as a local theng who understood how to use geography against an occupying force.

Well, Dr. Watson, what new Sherlock Holmes story are you going to tell us about next?

Well, now, next week, Mr. Bartell, I'm going to tell you of a strange adventure that Holmes and I had in the swampy Fenlands of Norfolk.

It concerned a gypsy encampment, a child that vanished, and a horrible death in the murky depths of a fearsome quagmire.

Tonight's Sherlock Holmes adventure was written by Dennis Green and Anthony Boucher and was suggested by an incident in the Arthur Conan Doyle story, The Adventure of the Three Students.

In my work as a prehistorian, I had discovered ritual traditions in which weapons were disposed of in watery places and where islands had particular potency.

How did these ancient British traditions find their way into the story of King Arthur, written centuries later? The answer lies just north of the Fens, in a region known as the Witham Valley.

In 1981, archaeologists digging here came across a remarkable discovery.

Just under the surface of the fen, a series of upright posts and horizontal timbers were uncovered.

In the late 18th century, when they were dredging the Wytham, Sir Joseph Banks, a great scientist and collector, put out a notice to the workmen to say, anybody finds anything, you come to me, I'll see you all right.

And it was a wonderful thing to do because this stuff wouldn't have found its way into the museums if that hadn't happened.

Over the years, literally hundreds of swords, daggers and other precious items have been dredged from the Fens here.

They range in date from the prehistoric period right through to the 14th century.

Drunkenness and occasional fights were not uncommon, but serious violence was rare.

Hop pickers traditionally spent the summer in Kent, but many Londoners also travelled to the Fens in the east of England to pick fruit.

One of these places was Wausauken, a small Fenland village on the border between Norfolk and Cambridgeshire.

Surrounded by farms and small holdings, it adjoins the market town of Wisbech and lies about 12 miles from the historic port of Kings Lynn.

Viking bands moved through the region burning settlements, seizing food, livestock and valuables, and destroying farms and estates.

They also pushed into the Fenlands, where people and animals were killed and communities were left exposed to further destruction.

From East Anglia, the Vikings eventually returned towards the Thames before turning west into Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

They followed the river valleys and roads through the interior, continuing to burn and plunder.

In Ireland, he kept well away from the hills and mountains of the west and the southwest and the far north.

Cromwell was very much a lowlander, born and brought up in the wetlands of the Fens and the flat expanses of East Anglia.

That was the sort of landscape he knew well and had ridden over.

And perhaps when it came to war, that was also the sort of landscape that suited him best.

If one were found, it would probably show that the alluvial deposits are somewhat thicker than these measurements, and that they descend to a depth about equal to that reached in the valleys of the Thames or Humber.

It is useless to discuss in more detail the lower submerged forests of the Fenland, for we cannot get at them to examine them properly.

they have been as effectually overwhelmed and hidden as the remains of king john's baggage train which has never been seen again since it wandered off the flooded causeway during the disastrous spring tide of october eleventh twelve sixteen and sank into the soft clay and quicksands the higher submerged forests of the fenland are however of great interest and as already pointed out they have been exposed to view in cutting the fendykes especially near ely perhaps a closer study of these might enable us to arrive at some idea of the time taken for the growth of a series of forests of this sort and for the accompanying mass of peat the variations in the flora also need more exact analysis before we can say what they betoken oak forest at the bottom is what we should expect on a clay soil but the reason for the succession of trees above is not obvious it need not necessarily point to climactic change though it may do so but it certainly looks as if the peaty bogs were alternately wetter and drier so that sometimes moss grew and sometimes fir trees

The hardest part was figuring out where to go.

Submerged forests of the ordinary type are often to be seen between tide marks on the flat shores of Lincolnshire, but as they still await proper study they need not here detain us, and we will pass on to the next large indentation of the coastline, the estuary of the Humber.

Here, owing to the excavation of extensive docks, and to a series of trial borings for a tunnel beneath the Humber, the structure of the valley has been clearly laid open.

It is much the same as that of the Thames, but as we are in a glaciated area we find, as in the Fenland, that much of the erosion had taken place before or during the glacial epoch, for boulder clay occupies part of the valley.

Boulder clay or till not only occupies part of the valley, it descends far below the present river bottom and even below the lowest submerged forest.

It's speed and cost.

But CPRE would point out, in actual fact, we do recognize some solar will go on the ground, but we're concerned that we're having a grid upgrade at the moment, our transmission network, and what we're doing is we're upgrading it to remote parts of the country, Eastlands, and that happens to be where our Fenlands and our best farmland is.

And we would point out, well, why aren't we upgrading the grid to better serve urban conurbations in the North and the Midlands to enable more homes and more commercial properties to be able to take advantage? And we have been doing work with the UK Warehousing Association.

Their members are crying out for more retrofit, having no or low interest loans.