John Norris Remembers...
The Fenland
Swaffham Prior parish is some five thousand acres and about half of it is in the low lying fen area. The history of this low area is bound up with the melting of the ice age, thousands of years ago, when the Wash and fen were created by the thawing glacier, leaving behind large freshwater lakes.. Much chalk had been pushed up into the east end of the Chiltern hills, and left the sedimentary clay sub strata covered with water. In time this fresh water lake grew reed and sedge in vast quantities, which were of no use as fodder or even harvested due to the primitive circumstances of the time. The remains of this growth just fell to ground and rotted, forming the black deposit some of us remember as peat.
Not all areas grew this peat, for nearer the sea, the tides deposited silt on the low places and built up the ground level. The rivers too originating in the west and north of the fen land deposited their suspensions when reaching the salt tides, thus in time making a barrier at the coast. My family farm near Wisbech is on a silt bank which is quite high towards the sea, but fades away as one goes inland. There are deposits of other types of marine life to be found. At Upware there is a ridge of coralline rag consisting as the name suggests of marine coral trapped in the ice until it thawed.
As I understand it, it was the Duke of Bedford, who so many years later tried to bring this vast area of boggy land into productive use, and to make it possible to get across it. Vermuyden, the Dutch engineer, was given the task of surveying the land and producing a scheme of drainage. Much has been written about his activities, and are not relevant here, except to say how they were to be financed.
The land was to be called the Bedford Level, and funded by a group of financers known as the Adventurers. Their money allowed the work to start, and they hoped that their largesse would in due time produce valuable assets, whether of minerals, turf as a fuel, grazing for cattle, plane agricultural land, or in the worst scenario worthless marsh. Considering most of this work would have to done by hand, and the lack of communications, it surely was a mammoth task. The main drain started at St Germans, on a silt bank and travelled south west across the silt lands towards the black fen many miles away. The excess water was pumped over this bank and discharged into the river Ouse, and thence to the sea.
In our part of the world, the South Level, the drainage works started by improving the banks of the river Cam to prevent most of the flooding, and constructing four Lodes or Banked rivers leading from the chalk highland and discharging into the Cam. The most important of these were the Burwell Lode, the two Swaffham Lodes, and one though Quy. Today these lodes have a diesel pumps or more likely electric ones to lift the water into the river if the levels are such that it cannot flow directly. But the original system did not have pumps until much later. It is probable that wind pumps lifted the water from the local dykes into the lodes.
I can not find a date for the layout of the south level drains which exist to day, but a good guess would be early Victorian, as the main artery is dead straight, an equal distance from the high land and the river Cam. At the time this would seem to be logical, as the land level was likely to be flat, but as the water was drained the underlying levels which were far from level emerged. Today the engineers are re-routing the drains through the lowest land, to catch the water easily. It is the huge capacity pumps which enable this to work, and being automatic, and electric requiring no operator as the diesel and coal fired steam pumps did.
As the water drained away the extraction of the peat could go ahead. The turves were cut and dried in the summer, and transported to Cambridge on barges pulled up the lodes and then along the river Cam. Have you ever counted the chimneys on the Cambridge Colleges? Hundreds of them, all burning peat until the railways arrived in the mid nineteenth century. These barges were pulled by horses walking down the middle of the river when they reach the Cambridge colleges. On the edge of the fen but previously under water, is a layer of calcium phosphate, or coprolite. This mineral is the fossilised remains of animal dung which was lying on the sea bed before the ice age. To extract this mineral was hard work as there was an overburden of several feet which had to be removed by hand, and then the prize emerged. Trenches were dug some ten feet wide, the coprolites dug out, and the trench filled with the over burden of the next trench.
Today (May 2008) the price of phosphate has risen dramatically to over £500 a ton, being in such short supply, and could re-open the value of these buried treasures. There is a vast deposit still lying underground, but knowing the difficulties of getting permission to almost anything new I doubt if any extraction will ever take place
An aerial photograph taken in 1963 clearly show the extent of these diggings. Interestingly the Google Map of today does not show much, as the ploughing these days is so much deeper than the old Ferguson tractor could manage, and the outlines of the trenches are almost gone. Another reason is that ploughing had not been going on much before the second world war, as the chief crops were rough hay, peat, and sheep and cattle grazing. On the corner of Black drive was the remains of the last trench in a field called Daniel's Cut. The Google map shows this has now been filled. Very sad, as this was a piece of history, and its existence did not affect the balance sheet at all. One of these old moats on Gutteridge Close in the village had the same fate several years ago, but I can remember it being there , and was the home for many frogs and toads. The conservation voice is not loud enough, as I fear the moat behind the school may be in jeopardy also. I am getting very near to the time when I first drove through the fen , and was amazed that such a large area of land could be in such a derelict state The War Ag Committee had done great work in putting down the concrete roads, but sadly ran out of steel reinforcement shortly after passing the station !! This deficiency has proved costly as the concrete cracked and had to be broken up, crushed, and used as a base for the flexible tarmac road we see there today.
The road into the Fen is called Whiteway Drove, due most likely to the amount of chalk used to make a hard surface. Black Drive was obviously just the raw fen soil, whereas Split Drove was one of the droves going north-south, as the main droves went east west straight towards the river. It was the War Ag that connected them near the river bank, and made a through road to Upware. Previously these droves ended at a ferry, and gave an outlet to Waterbeach Fen, and so on to Cambridge.
The chief reason for the poor crops, or one of then, was the inability to control fungal diseases. Mould of one kind or another affected wheat and barley, sugar beet, potatoes, carrots, and could not be controlled successfully until Dithane and its derivatives arrived. The fen used to be covered with mushrooms in the autumn, acres of them all glistening white against the black fen soil; but not today. The profitability of the farms is now great, as the crops now grow well especially as the trace elements question has also been addressed. The only problem now is political, and related to the global affairs and super- market domination. All the fields, at least those under my jurisdiction had names. I fancy that to day they are classified by O.S. numbers, nowhere near as romantic. Daniels Cut, already mentioned, Harts ground, Swan Lake, now that is a name from the past, the double dolver etc. A dolver was seven acres, so the double dolver would be fourteen! Mebblies, Bush Ground, Horse Ground, and Low Bridge Hole, Headlake drove, Swan Lake, to name a few more.