Eastern promise

The Fens’ unique brand of dark magic has survived centuries of upheaval, as Clive Aslet discovers.

This isn’t a landscape for everybody. immense skies, black earth, a Mondrian-like road pattern of straight lines and right angles into which are tucked, in late spring, corners of unharvested daffodils, like partygoers who’ve forgotten to go home: that’s the Fens. The sunsets can have the ferocity of a Viking burial.

There are, of course, wonderful things to see in this strange, sometimes spooky place. Ely Cathedral, the octagon of which once served as a lighthouse to guide travellers across the Fens, still makes the heart lift with feelings akin to relief, even to car drivers: silhouetted against the sky, its great but delicately shaped bulk promises civilisation and tea at The Old Fire Engine house. Wisbech is as fine a Georgian town as can be found anywhere. however, for all such treasures, there’s a frisson when visiting the Fens. This can seem a thrillingly foreign land.

Those who have an eye for fen landscape think that low horizons, broken, perhaps, by the fretted outline of a wood—or, more likely, a row of pylons—have an intensity missing from more manicured places. This is a working countryside, from which wilderness has long been banished by geometry. Immense fields are striated with potato rows or striped with the almost luminous colours of salad crops. (That’s around Gedney, where a popular pastime, I’ve been told, is to sit on the sea bank and watch the RAF helicopters shoot up the targets on the bombing ranges in the Wash.)

Don’t expect the jolly waterways of the Norfolk Broads with their colourful locks and pleasure boats—the great, rectilinear Denver Sluice and other engineering works don’t aim to charm. And yet, for all that it’s manmade, humankind is strangely absent. Few people live on the Fens. At night, the skies are among the darkest in Britain.