A brooding sky and mirrored waters (Fen Country)

JOURNAL ENTRY

6th June, Friday

“We walk through the sheep field
 As the rain pours down.
 My boot socks still wet from last night.
 The rooks muster noisily at the One Oak.

Even the magpies’ cackles cannot wake
 The lambs still asleep
 Nestled beneath the blackthorn hedge.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

The world outside, drips and sparkles. The rain may have stopped, for a while at least, but tear-drop rings continue to form in the water under the canal-side alders and the oaks. The broad sword leaves of the yellow flag glow silver in the darkness. 

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the dripping dark of an early summer night to you wherever you are.

It is so lovely to see you. Thank you so much for coming. Come inside before the rain starts again. The kettle has just boiled; the cabin is snug and dry and there is a seat waiting for especially for you. So, take off your wet coat, make yourself comfortable and welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS

The skyways are busy right now. Particularly during that period when things normally settle down after sunrise or before roosting. Here, the rooks a clustering around the One Oak and along them telegraph wire that runs alongside the railway line. The young are mostly fully fledged by now and joining the family on their forays among the fields and meadows. And their rook gatherings are growing bigger, families merging – the yearly transition from family to community – although those ties and bonds still remain (and this year’s young will remain with the family for at least a year), they are becoming less visible – less distinct to the casual observer. Looking across the field, all you see are busy bodies striding and strutting, fishing the land as the heron fishes the water. Every now and again, they lift off en masse, in a whirling vortex of wing and sky-clamouring calls. 

But now, they have yet to settle down and become earth-bound. They have taken off from the roosts and the much-repaired nests and joined the dawn muster that sets first light aboil in its joyous tumult and cacophony. First a small group, circling, calling out to the sleepy skyline on ragged wings and slowly they cluster, north, south, east, and west. Then, on some sign, they wheel off together – although, there is usually one or two stragglers – or perhaps rooks of independent mind and character – and the group flies off on their dawn patrol of their territory. It happens in reverse at dusk. Autumn and Spring are the best times to see this. But today, the patrols are done, the fishing fields have been selected and now it’s time to stop before the day’s work begins. To pass on news of the night. To sort out the politics that emerges in any community, who is sitting where and next to whom. Squabbles, chatter, most sit and watch the sun’s progress up the great wall of sky and the shadows shorten. This is the rookery coffee-break, the water cooler moment. Today, as is often the case, the One Oak is the local coffeeshop; familiar, convenient, always happy to welcome you.       
  

And this week, they have had to introduce their young to rain. After a very long spell of warm, dry weather, this week the spell has truly been broken. Mostly, it has been the best of rain (as far as the land is concerned), gentle, refreshing, replenishing, rain. Although, it is only in the last couple of days that the towpath beneath the mature oaks and ash have got damp – despite one or two relatively heavy showers. In a lot of places, the land still hasn’t lost its deeply fissured, worry lines yet. However, the other evening, the rain came down so heavily, hammering and battering on the cabin roof and thrashing the surface of the canal into white fury. It sounded just like someone was throwing gravel at the cratch cover that is at the bow of Erica. It came down so hard that the runnels each side of the cabin roof were overwhelmed and the rain started to pour down under the stern canopy and onto the stern deck. There are ridges on the roof that should direct the water down towards the drainage points, but these are no way large or high enough to cope with really serious rain. This has happened before, and so it is something we automatically keep an eye on in deluging showers. A few well-placed tubs and pots solve the issue very easily.

I wonder, just what those young rooks felt and experienced, sitting in their lofty homes among the glistening dark shimmer of wet leaf and branch. What did they make of it – this cascade of water from the sky – their playground, battlefield, and home that they are only just getting to know. Did they look to their parents? Did their parents look back? Was there solace, and shelter – a sanctuary in that familial contact on that night their skies turned to water?

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

A BROODING SKY AND MIRRORED WATERS (FEN COUNTRY)

[Wisbech St Mary, Sutton St James, Tydd St Giles, Tydd St Mary, Walpole St Andrew, Walpole St Peter, Terrington St John, Tilney St Lawrence, Tilney All Saints, Terrington St Clements, Wiggenhall St Mary the Virgin, Wiggenhall St Germans, Wiggenhall St Peter, Wiggenhall St Mary Magdelene, Ramsey St Mary, St John’s Fen End, Marshland St James, Bradford St George, Bradford St Clare] 

The Fens. What kind of place is this: This flat landscape of cloud and water and earth and straight lines? A place where water, soil, and light create a world of haunted solitary emptiness. Scoured by drains and ditches; blistered by dykes. Trees are few, and those that are here, a generally grouped in clumps to shield s lonely farmhouse from the brutal lashing of the North Sea wintering winds. From their asymmetrical shapes and foliage, it is easy to identify the direction of the prevailing winds: Mountain and cliff-top trees in a place with no mountains and no cliffs.

In January 2020, just before the pandemic hit:

Jan 2020

Driving up to Norfolk, through the brooding fen country, the heavy sky hung so low that it seemed to brush the tops of the rushes and the wind-blown reeds. The ploughed fields were bare and long fingers of steel-coloured puddles pooled the rusty soil. Then a rook alighted by the side of the road. Wings outstretched, toying with the raging air, its feet touched the earth with such delicate precision. The landscape was so heavy it felt as if it would suck you in; enmired forever in mud and iron hard skies - but the rook brought lightness to that place, deftly lifting off from the cloying ground as we sped past and, in doing so, it transformed the world... 

What is it about this place that reaches out to some deep part of you?

Others have felt its tug on their heart and soul too.

Edward Storey

‘You walk on the roof of the world here’

[READING]

There is something here that is soul deep in this airy land, eerie some might call it, of flooding light and distant skylines. Although, those of us who do not belong here, who have yet to feel the heartbeat of this special land, might feel overwhelmed in its strangeness. Roads, arrow straight, straighter than any Roman could make them, mirror the straightness of dyke and spade dug trenches and ditches.  Walk the fields for any length and it is not roads you’ll cross, but water. And lots of it. This rich fertile land that was reclaimed from the sea. Miles away, the North Sea hungrily nibbles at the coast line. This is a land whose dreams and memories are still washed with the eddies and dark currents of its older lives. And it is still here in this marsh country, now tamed and diced: A fine threaded aquatic lattice-work grid of interconnected drainage and irrigation ditches. Where in the wolds and dales you’ll find hedges, here the land is marked out as a hydrous patchwork counterpane of ditch and dyke. A two-dimensional landscape of angles, sharp edges, bisecting lines, geometric, arithmetic. Two-dimensional, flat, but not without depth, or richness, and certainly not without character, or even a haunting charm.

Villages, often mere hamlets of a few houses, dot and cluster along the drove roads like spring buds on a watery limb – crow-flight straight. Their names hold some kind of enchantment about them – old poetry, old music half-heard, worn smooth by the east wind and tired lips: Methwold Hythe, Fotheringhay, Hockwold-cum-Wilton, Cockley Cley, Wissington, Prickwillow, Westley Waterless.

Wind whipped and rain clawed, crow scalded and sun scorched, this is a land of far horizons, is a land of no compromise and without pretension. There’s an honesty about this place. It’s a place of no hiding.

Stand here in the flatlands, under the great geese-haunted bell of greys and blues, it is easy to feel that this is a land sculpted in a time before the Bible. Does that brooding sky and mirrored waters still wait? Wait to hear the soft pulse of the breath of God moving through the whispering reeds over the face of the deep? Standing among the great unbounded, prairie-wide, swaying oceans of wheat and barley and sugar beet, it is difficult not to detect that hushed sense of expectancy – even when the heavy tractors roar past on out-sized wheels. As if the land is still waiting, aware that in the periphery, the unordinary, the weird, the primordial still lurks. The strange lantern lights that glow in the distance, marsh gas, willow o’ the wisps, lantern men. On these flat lands of the fen country, there is room enough for all these and more; black dog, bogle, the malignant and the exiled. Perhaps that is why the church is so often not only the centre of these scattered hamlets but have become subsumed into their very names.

Wisbech St Mary, Tydd St Giles, Tydd St Mary, Walpole St Andrew, Walpole St Peter, Terrington St John, Tilney St Lawrence, Tilney All Saints, Terrington St Clements, Wiggenhall St Mary the Virgin, Wiggenhall St Germans, Wiggenhall St Peter, Wiggenhall St Mary Magdelene, Ramsey St Mary, St John’s Fen End, Marshland St James, Bradford St George, Bradford St Clare, 

Names that ring like a litany. “This land of churches” Luke Sherlock calls it, and he is right.  Little sanctuary islands, strung like stepping stones across the mist shrouded levels – with its hidden dykes and drainage ditches to catch and drown the unwary traveller. On clear days, it would be possible, if you knew the lie of the land, to navigate your way across these long expanses just by spying church tower and steeple. Or could. In days gone by, these would have been the tallest buildings, towering beacons of reassurance and direction (geographical as much as spiritual). I can’t be the only tourist, lost in the fens to suddenly espy the great lantern of Ely Cathedral rise above the sea of fields and say “that’s the way we need to be heading.” However, alas, a number are now abandoned and derelict. The rib work of the rafters of their naves split and spread-eagled to the sun and the winds and stars. (Nature can also have something of the Viking about it.) And now an older Pentecost rain falls upon the chancel and the derelict altar and a wilder psalm is heard.

Perhaps the reason why there is something about the Fens that has such a powerful pull on me is that they seem to have so much in common with canals. Both Fens and canals are very much liminal spaces – lands on the edge, intersectional, on the margins - part one thing and part another. As a consequence, they both suffer those same ambiguities, mistrusts, suspicions.

For one thing. Neither are natural. They are both entirely constructed landscapes. Fenland, is older, yet nonetheless, the signs and scarring of human hands are evident all around. Both are the result of incredible, almost miraculous feats of human invention and physical endeavour. Both involved immense and intrusive alterations to the land and ecologies. Both were achieved through pick, shovel and hard labour. Both entailed the land’s relationship with water. One, the draining of the vast tracts of the East Anglian swampy wetlands and marshes. The other, the laying down of large troughs to bring in water to field and wood, moors and town. One the digging down into the soil, the other, the raising up of dykes to hold back errant waters. Both involved the development of technologies to control and maintain water.

Yes, it is true that fens and canal systems are places of land and water, but they are even more so places of human ingenuity and accomplishment. These are ecospheres made only possible by human hand. These places of wild are, in fact, entirely man-u-factured. However, they have both lain long enough in our history and our forgetting to feel almost natural. Although you cannot ignore the effects of human hands on these landscapes, the hard edges are becoming blurred, nature flows back and heals the scars. Within the spoils of post-industrial heartlands kingfisher and iris flash. Within the uncompromising flatlands of unhedged agriculture, orchid and harrier are found. They are both new, but also somehow immensely old.  

Within the apparent bleakness and the bittern’s mournful booming and the mud-soaked drabness, oh, there is beauty here too.

And what is more, both landscapes, breed a people born to see a beauty where others see harshness and hardship. A people who have learnt to flow into their landscapes and let themselves be moulded by it. Perhaps, now, with the decline of the working boaters, more so the Fens than the canals. However, there is still enough in it to hold true still to both. People like these, who inhabit and are at ease with the liminal lands the uncommon lands, can be viewed with suspicion and even prejudice. They’re different from us. They’re not quite like us and so stories and rumours grow up and take root about these people of the elements, those whose lives lean into the winds. There’s a strength and a dignity about these people of the fens (just as there was with those of the canals): A pride in who they are - ‘Fen Tigers’ is what the people of the Fens call themselves. People carved from water and loam. Different, rugged. Legend has it, according to Edward Storey that “all true fenmen have black-webbed feet.”

A month or so ago, Mark Elvin, probable better known to listeners as Captain Bugwash, sent me a poem he had come across that he thought I’d might appreciate. He was right.

It is a poem by a Fenland man; Jeff Moore and it is called ‘The Worked Land’

‘The worked land’ by Jeff Moore
 
 [READING]

I’m really glad to hear that the campaign for the Fenland to have its own flag – to celebrate and be proud of its own identity – is gaining momentum and support – link in the programme notes

I’m going to leave the last words to Luke Sherlock – who you might know through his Instagram persona English Pilgrim or his inspiring independent bookshop in Frome Sherlock and Pages (Links also in programme notes). Among Luke’s other talents is his incredible gift for words. His recent book Forgotten Churches published by Quarto Publishing held me spellbound – not just by the beauty of the book itself, but by his writing.

I am really grateful that Luke has given me permission to read this following extract from it which, I think, sums up this enigmatic, almost unwordly, character of the Fen country.

‘St Peter, Wiggenhall St Peter, Norfolk’

[READING]

SIGNING OFF 

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG