In the Fens

It takes a week to cycle from Penzance to Berwick. It took me 40 years. Because on the way, I wanted to include every town in England, in what amounted to some two years of day-rides. Most of these rides were point-to-point, but some were loops, and some looked on the map like a dropped noodle. It wasn’t a continuous line, but many separate lines, and all rides included towns I had not visited before. I used trains to get to starting points. Each ride had to be at least 20 miles, and in each new town, I had to touch a central feature, ideally the market cross or town hall. This is just one of hundreds of rides on this lifetime’s journey. A few more journey writeups can be found at my “Riding the Shires” website, from which this was taken, at ukbicyclist.weebly.com (along with a couple of long memoires of the Soviet bloc).

Another winter ride, in January 2016, in the Fens. The route was Cambridge, where I was attending a linguists’ convention, to Peterborough, where I could take a train back up north. Actually, I started just outside Cambridge. Unable to get a cheap room in this overpriced city of tourists and champagne socialists, I’d spent the night at a roadside Travelodge-type place, at Boxworth.

On longer bike rides, I like to get off to a flying start for five miles or so before I start dawdling and popping into churches and refreshment outlets. But today, I got sidetracked in the very first village, Swavesey, when a minister standing outside a large and handsome brick Baptist chapel called out a cheery welcome as I pedalled past. Invitation enough for a light chat on the little-known topic of Fenland nonconformity, so I stopped and turned back.

He was taking the air after just wrapping up a Sunday service. The congregation was a pretty healthy 45-50, he said, of all ages, including young families. How, I asked, did Baptists differ from the other Protestant sects? Not greatly, he replied. As the name suggested, there was more emphasis on baptism. In fact, the Baptists themselves were divided into two sects; there was a chapel for the “Particulars” down the road. While regular Baptists believe in general redemption, the Strict and Particular Baptists, if I understood him rightly, believe that only a chosen few who have been baptised by full immersion will achieve it. I would probably pass the Particulars’ chapel down the road, he added, with, I thought, the faintest hint of distaste.

The reason why Swavesey and other Cambridgeshire villages were such fertile ground for the these sects can be summed up in one name, the minister said, Charles Spurgeon, who, as the Learn Religions website pithily puts it, was either “a pulpit buffoon or a the finest preacher of his day.” Spurgeon was a Particular Baptist at Waterbeach, a nearby village. He was active all over Essex and Cambridgeshire during his bible-thumping years in the mid-nineteenth century. His critics accused him of sensationalism and over-emoting as an orator, but he left a legacy of writings that remain popular today, as well as a liberal scattering of isolated chapels among the beet fields of the Fens.

The C of E church at Swavesey was also worth a stop, featuring as it did a bit of Anglo-Saxon long-and-short work on the chancel arch and a set of excellently preserved mediaeval pews. These wouldn’t have looked out of place in an infants’ school — by today’s standards, the mediaevals must have been almost midgets. The tower clock was one of those that was “right twice a day.” It wasn’t a money issue — this is a rich county, the steward said. They just couldn’t find a restorer capable of fixing the jammed mechanism.

Swavesey also had a small original wetland fen, which until the 1950s was the site of national amateur speed-skating championships. This sport was practiced all over the Fens until very recently, as the levels waterlogged by the rains of November and December could be relied on to freeze over in January and February. Alas, winters are not cold enough for that now, and Fenland skating is all but dead.

The final distraction at this village was the busway, a disused railway line between Huntingdon and Cambridge converted to dedicated bus use. But instead of just turning it into a road, they’d kept the trackbed and replaced the metals with wide concrete rails, along which the buses sort of glided, so it was still more tramway than road. As to what the merits of this arrangement were, I could not work out.

And so out onto the Fens, perhaps the least appreciated of the English landscapes. Despite their historic wealth, based on wool and manifest in their many superb churches, they were considered an awful place even back in the seventeenth century, after the great reclamations. Celia Fiennes called Ely a “nest of unclean creatures;” her near contemporary Lieutenant Hammond damned the people as “halfe Fish, half Flesh, for they drinke like Fishes, and sleep like Hogges.”

You search in vain for such colour nowadays. The dried out Fens are still, as they say, an acquired taste, and it took me years to acquire it. Because half my family comes from Boston, I saw a lot of the Fens in my early childhood, as we drove across them twice a year at about 30 mph to visit grandparents. In all my life, I cannot remember longer, more tedious hours that those spent staring out of the rear window at those huge level fields, devoid of hedges, hamlets, villages, factories, mills, parks, hillocks, dells or copses or any other feature of interest. Just fields, with a forlorn line of wind-break trees on the horizon. Very occasionally, we caught the tulips blooming in great lakes of colour around Spalding. Otherwise, all there was to look out for was the road signs along the A16, slowly counting down the miles to Boston.

When you go across the Fens by bike, only one thing matters. Which way is the wind blowing? As any cyclist who has got this wrong will testify, few things in biking are more draining and dispiriting than tackling a strong Fenland headwind. (Except perhaps getting a puncture while tackling a strong Fenland headwind). It’s such a grim experience that there is, inevitably, a special club of masochists whose thing is Fenland headwind racing. Or maybe it was in Holland; can’t remember now.

But when you get a full tailwind, you simply fly along, sometimes clocking up maybe 25 mph, which is almost as fast as my ultra-cautious dad would drive it up the A16. Because the roads are nearly all straight, with few junctions, and the traffic usually light, you can keep it up for hours.

This day there was almost no wind, so I did the Fens in neutral, so to speak, dawdling from village to village. In Over, a fine brick house dated 1632, once The Old Black Horse pub, looked externally pretty much unchanged from the seventeenth century. The date made it contemporary with Vermuyden and the Dutch drainage engineers hired by Charles 1 to essentially create the landscape I was now riding through. Perhaps they’d even supped and moaned about the gnat’s piss English ale at the Old Black Horse. On second thoughts, that’s unlikely, as the Dutch diggers were resented by the Fenlanders for wrecking their fishing and fowling economy, and went about in fear of assault.

I zigzagged across the levels via Willingham and Earith, the very heart of the Fens, and the southern cornerstone of Vermuyden’s reclamation project; between here and the Denver sluice two dozen miles northeast were cut the two parallel Bedford rivers on which the drainage of the Fens depended. This pivotal position has left Earith a busy, flood-prone junction of both roads and waterways. Currently a hub for the boating fraternity, it was known the past for ice-skating and a form of village ice-hockey known as bandy. Neither have survived. On this mild, clear January day, the temperature was about ten degrees too high for ice sports.

On to Somersham, where the brickwork of the eighteenth-century former schoolhouse carried the scratched names and initials of generations of children of the village who had passed through its doors. (Not a guess; the first passerby I asked about these names turned out to be local historian). I tried to read a few: was it Tracy, Myra? Hard to be sure. But this little thing so pleased me I decided to stop and eat here, at the Rose & Crown, where Heart Radio or whatever the annoying racket was abruptly yanked me back to the 21st century. “Yes, you can save £10 on all Hotpoint kitchen appliances,” droned the chirpy young voice as I gazed at the fine old fireplace and studied the sepia village photos on the wall. “And check out our range of vacuum cleaners.” Oh, knob off.

Despite the radio, the place was empty and there would be no wait, so I ordered a full Sunday dinner. “No worries,” said the barman, and he proceeded to use that irritating phrase at the end of everything he said.

“OK to sit by the fireplace?”

“Yeah, no worries.”

“No need for any sauces.”

“Right, no worries.”

“Oh, where’s the toilet?”

“Back of the lounge bar, no worries.”

“Fancy a wife-swap tonight?”

“Sure, no worries.”

“And could you turn the radio off and FUCKING WELL STOP SAYING ‘NO WORRIES’?”

“OK. No worries.”

I made that last bit up, of course, but not the commentary I copied down verbatim five minutes later on a napkin when the darts came on, relayed from the lounge bar (he actually turned the bloody volume up, not down). Whoever dreamt up the idea of darts on the radio? And what riveting entertainment it was. “Tunk. He’s willing it into the double five. Tunk, Oooh! Tunk. This is a massive throw! Tunk. YES! He’s got it! He’s going through a purple patch to match his purple shirt .. How massive is this for Canadian darts!”

The turkey and cranberry dinner, though, was excellent and put me in such eager spirits that I set off again without bothering to check the map. As a result, I plunged straight down a long cul-de-sac that ended, as many cul-de-sacs in the Fens do, at the bank of a significant water barrier. I turned back. Fifteen minutes later I was back at the Rose & Crown (“Hi, you again! Lost? No worries!”). Having checked the map, I set off once again down the right road. The wrong way down the right road. Only after a mile did I realise my mistake. I was actually on a route I’d used before about three decades before, but I remembered nothing.

Twenty-five minutes after that meal, I finally got out of Somersham and found myself in big, open, arable country with fields of rich brown earth that showed the faintest of undulations — a crinkling at the edges of the levels. Then came the day’s only real ascent, a 20-foot rise no higher than a two-storey house at the top of which was — and I’m not making this up — the Pidley Mountain Rescue Team. I confess I fell hook, line and sinker for this joke name, assuming it was an administrative or comms centre or something for the helicopter teams out in Snowdonia. In fact, the Pidley Mountain Rescue Team was a charity for the disabled, so named after volunteers had pushed a car that had got stuck on the short slope.

The countryside here had a little more character than the factory-farmed inner fens, with their massive, regular grids of field and miles-long drains. The roads were winding and ancient, and the villages usually had a few houses of character. A great many of the cottages in these parts, though, were built of ugly, yellowy engineering brick. I don’t know how much this is the fault of Warboys, the next village, which is known nationally for brick production, in particular the Warboys Whites.

Warboys, a large, rather workaday village, is also known locally for the hanging in the late 1500s of a family for “bewitching” the five fit-prone daughters of the Throckmorton family, and having magically wrought the death of a local lady: the sort of thing you associate more with darkest Africa than any European nation. The witch-hunting age is a subject I find so revealing of the hidden worst in human nature that I don’t care to dwell on it. You can look up the details of this Fenland tragedy online.

Few of the villages I’d passed through this day were places of outstanding charm, but the next stop, Ramsey, was an exception. This small town I did remember, for its narrow, pretty main street and ruined abbey. The family of Oliver Cromwell had a house here, for which Ramsey had little reason to be thankful, as one of them is believed to have brought the plague to the town in a bale of cloth.

When I’d last ridden through, over 30 years before, the roads had been quiet and the shops bustling. Today, the cramped roads were insufferably busy, even on a Sunday, and too many shops had To Let signs out. Another change was the number of no-speeding signs in and around Ramsey. For whatever reason, people, I do think, had less urge or need to hit the accelerator in the 1980s.

Then it was back out onto the levels again for the last leg to Peterborough. The day was now dying, but the low sun and deepening shadows brought out the retiring beauty of the winter Fens. The bare trees and lonely roadside chapels stood stark, the big brown fields showed a furry sheen of new growth, and the drains glittered like threads of molten silver in the slanting sun.

Farms stood sometimes half a mile from the road; a couple of driveways had little columns with stone unicorns and lions, pompously standing guard over barns piled high with turnips and potatoes. Otherwise, there was no real settlement for eight miles other than tiny isolated Pondersbridge, on the banks of another arrow-straight waterway my map called Bevill’s Leam. Then into Peterborough, in darkness, and straight onto a GNER train north.

More like this can be found at my website ukbicyclist.weebly.com.

All text and photos @joeslater

I’m fine with being quoted (up to two paragraphs), but all rights @joeslater.