#579: Natural History Reading List #26: Fenland Nature

A cross-posting from my GeoLibrary blog, which currently features over 700 books.

This was picked up in Topping Books just before the summer 2025. It's a really detailed and comprehensive guide to the nature to be found in the Fens. It's a book to dip into rather than read cover to cover, with chapters exploring different aspects of the Fenland landscape.

There are lots of excellent photographs, mostly taken by the authors themselves, who have certainly put in the legwork and mileage to cover the region they are writing about.

Publisher's description:

This book showcases the natural history and landscape of the Fens, an area now responsible for a third of Britain’s food production and worth over £3 billion to the economy every year. It describes the geology and geography across the Fenland Basin over the last 14,000 years, a period dominated by the flux of wetlands and movement of water. The human relationship with this landscape is traced through history: from Mesolithic hunters to the prosperity of a medieval economy based on the currency of eels, through the taming and draining of the vast wetlands, to modern farming on an industrial scale.

While recognising that only a fraction of the Fens is left, Fenland Nature celebrates the breadth of wildlife still to be found in the region, from vast flocks of visiting wildfowl in the winter months, to rare and specialised plants and insects – all illustrated with detailed and evocative photographs.

The book concludes by contemplating an uncertain future where there are possibilities for a sustainable agricultural industry alongside increasing biodiversity, requiring new ways of thinking and working with the land. The fenland landscape is a microcosm of the huge global challenges caused by habitat loss, ecological degradation and climate change. If solutions can be found to these complex issues in the Fens, then there is hope that these can also apply to similar places across the world.

It's written by two local authors who really know their local patch well. A great coffee table / browsing book.

A good review by Mark Avery.

It sits nicely with my other Fenland books - dipped into to inform my teaching about the local area.

My copy was published by Pelagic Publishing.

Paperback, 376pp

ISBN: 9781784274108

#552: The John Clare Countryside Project

This was on the local news magazine programme tonight.

John Clare was a poet who was influenced by nature and the outside world.

The artist in residence Kathryn Parsons was interviewed.

The project is expanding.

An excellent booklet which provides details of the project

Download the booklet here (PDF download)

You can also download a set of Education resources.

The 2015 film By Our Selves (Andrew Kötting), featuring Toby Jones, traced Clare’s walk. Other fans of Clare’s work include Patrick Stewart and Damon Albarn.

#460: The A14 - biodiversity net gain fail...

This has been a story featured in various news locations, and is one I'm familiar with, as I've driven along, and seen the tens of thousands of dead trees which line it...

The Guardian reports on the failure of this schemes supposed biodiversity net gain.

More trees are apparently being planted....

#357: Wicken Fen's 125th birthday

2024 marks the 125th birthday of Wicken Fen: a local nature reserve to me in Cambridgeshire.

Wednesday 1 May 2024 marked 125 years since the National Trust acquired its first two acres of land at Wicken Fen. 

Since 1899, when it became the National Trust's first nature reserve, Wicken Fen has now expanded to over 2,000 acres. Today, it is one of Europe's most important wetlands and home to more than 9,000 species.

#216: Wicken Fen- 125th anniversary

2024 marks the 125th anniversary of the founding of Wicken Fen.

From the website:

Before 1899, the Sedge Fen area was home to a thriving sedge-harvesting community, and was frequented by naturalists who delighted in this remnant of undrained fenland. 

In the 19th century, Wicken Fen became popular with Victorian naturalists - while there isn't evidence that Charles Darwin actually visited Wicken, he is known to have collected beetles in the fens in 1820. Later, during the first half of the 20th century, Cambridge botanists Sir Harry Godwin and Dr Arthur Tansley - recognised as the fathers of modern ecology and conservation - carried out cutting-dge studies in the area.

In the late 19th century, with the local sedge and peat industries collapsing, naturalists paid villagers to assist with collecting trips on the Fen, and also bought up land from them. Distinguished entomologist Herbert Goss suggested the National Trust should consider saving Wicken Fen as early as 1898, as it was 'the haunt of much wildlife'. These naturalists then sold or gifted their land at Wicken to the newly-formed National Trust, including J C Moberley whose two acres were sold to the organisation for £10. Other notable donors included George Verrall, MP for Newmarket, who bequesthed 239 acres, on his death in 1911. Banker Charles Rothschild, an early influential figure in nature conservation donated parts of St Edmunds and Adventurers' Fens in 1901.

In 1999 - to mark the 100th anniversary of the first acquisition - the Wicken Fen Vision was launched, a 100-year project that will see the nature reserve expanded from Wicken Fen to the edge of Cambridge. Since 1999, the size of the reserve has more than doubled, for the benefit of wildlife, and for access into green space for people.

Image: © National Trust Images/Rob Coleman

Wicken Fen is very close to Ely, and the school where I work.

#188: Fred Ingrams' Flat Earth

One of my favourite contemporary landscape artists is Fred Ingrams.

He has painted hundreds of colourful representations of The Fens over the years, and others of the Flowlands of Scotland, around Caithness.

The Fens is an area that I will certainly look to write about for any resources that emerge, as an example of a landscape with a particular natural history, which has been shaped in recent centuries by the actions of people.

He has now created a book called Flat Earth. Fred says:

I have been painting the Fens for over a decade, producing around 500 paintings in that period. In some ways I suppose this book can be considered a retrospective. 

I’ve chosen a collection of paintings that I feel have passed the test of time – a showreel of my greatest hits. They do not appear in any particular order and are not chronological. It is my hope that looking at this book feels like wandering through an exhibition of my work.

The hard back book measures 23 x 29cm and is 200 pages long, containing over 100 paintings as well as a foreword by Susan Owens and an introduction written by myself.

I have a copy of a catalogue of a previous exhibition of his paintings which has an excellent introduction by Jonathan Meades. 

A film of Fred at work:

#167: The Great Fen Project

A piece in The Guardian - which seems to be the paper with the best reporting on the environment and nature - on the Great Fen project. It's described as 'a gamechanger'.

The Great Fen project is organised by Wildlife Trust conservationists.

The project has already cost £10m and its price tag could reach £30m by the time it is completed.

The money – which has included an £8m donation from the National Lottery Heritage Fund – is being used to buy large sections of farmland to create a 9,000-acre site around two nature reserves – one at Holme Fen and the other at Woodwalton Fen, the latter being one of the very first wildlife refuges created in the UK . The land will then be transformed by allowing water to return to previously drained fields.

The Great Fen projects hopes to attract rare bird species such as bitterns. Photograph: FLPA/Alamy

A project to follow, and a place to visit perhaps for those schools close to the area. I've been to Holme Fen previously to see the post that was driven into the ground and now stands well proud of it.