A brief history of the Great Fen

1070. The Fenland was the last area of England captured by William the Conqueror and it was at the Isle of Ely that Hereward the Wake made his last stand against the forces of the Conqueror.

1083-1130. Ely Cathedral was built with stone from Barnack just north of Peterborough. The stone was transported on sleds to the river Welland and loaded onto barges in which it travelled down the Nene and the fenland waterways.

1086. In the Domesday book, William of Malmesbury wrote: “here is such quantities of fish as to cause astonishment in strangers.” The Domesday Book also recorded that the fishing and mere of the Abbot of Ramsey in Holme parish (part of Whittlesea Mere) was valued at £10, a very large sum in those days. Woodwalton church was mentioned too, but not Ramsey's church and parish as it was entirely owned by the Abbey and so exempt from taxes.The Liber Elienis, a 12th-century English chronicle described: “fish innumerable, eels, large water wolves, pickerel, perch, roach, burbots and lampreys”. The wildlife of the fens in those days must have been amazing.

1100-1135 During the reign of Henry I, Ramsey Abbey acquired the manor of Walton (Woodwalton) with its common rights from Walter de Bolebec. The Abbey was also granted Higney in 1134, a grange with earthworks and a surrounding ditch. Both these places are within the Great Fen area.

1135-1150  Eels were so common they were used as currency and for payment of rent. The very name Ely is said to mean “island of eels”. In 1150 the monks of Ramsey paid a rent of 3,000 eels to the monks of Peterborough, for leave to quarry stone which would have been transported by water from the quarries at Barnack, through the river systems, across Whittlesea Mere and on to Ramsey for building work at the Abbey. Sawtry Abbey, founded in 1147 was also very wealthy and often housed parties of nobles travelling on the Great North Road.

1143-44 Geoffrey de Mandeville was a rebel baron who maintained himself and his followers in the fen-country using Ely and Ramsey Abbeys as his headquarters. He expelled the monks, laid waste the surrounding areas, pillaged and burnt the settlements and caused a famine. He and his son illegally built small motte and bailey castles at Woodwalton and Ramsey, where the castle mounds can still be seen.

1150-1300 The first dykes in the Great Fen area appear to have been dug in the 12th century.  Monks Lode was dug by the monks of Sawtry Abbey to get stone from the quarries at Barnack for building. To do this they had to cross the lands of Ramsey Abbey, there were disputes about access between the two abbeys. In 1192 the monks of Sawtry  undertook not to ''plant trees or fish in Ramsey Marsh'.

Wheatley’s drain was dug at about the same time or soon after. The area of fen now within the Woodwalton Fen National Nature Reserve was owned by Ramsey Abbey in the 13th century and had been drained sufficiently to allow the land to be used for sheep grazing and mowing marsh, but probably only in the summer months. There were two moated manor houses, one in Woodwalton, the moat of the other manor at Great Raveley can still be seen at Raveley Wood Nature Reserve.

1487 Bishop Morton of Ely caused ‘Morton’s Leam’ to be cut in 1487 to aid water flow and water traffic between Peterborough and Wisbech. This was the first straight drain in the Fenland. Although this must have had some effect on the lands south of the Leam (Whittlesea Mereprobably decreased in size) drainage of the area in general deteriorated.

Those few people who lived on the fens at this time had a livelihood based on fish, fowl and building materials. People used stilts, punts and bone ice skates to make their way across the fens.  Rights to cut reed were carefully controlled and managed by manorial courts.  Willow and reeds were used for building houses and thatching houses.

However, floods were unpredictable and caused many deaths by drowning. Many landowners wished to make the area more productive through conventional agricultural practices, which could only be achieved through large-scale drainage schemes.

After the land was drained, the peat started to dry and contract so that the land sank further - leaving the rivers and dykes  inside their banks at a higher level than the land. It became necessary to raise the water from the field ditches up into the higher drains. From 1685, windmills, with their great sails were used to power pumps to lift the water. Nine windmills were recorded in Woodwalton parish alone. Later, the pumps were powered by steam, followed by diesel and electricity. Over the years, new sluices and drains had to be built as the land continued to fall.

For a long period early maps show the Great Fen area as a poor wet boggy place. An estate map of 1770 shows the whole of the area south of Whittlesea Mere as either turf fen or wet pasture. The resources of the Great Fen area were carefully managed. Each farm and village along the fenland edge included both tracts of arable land and pasture on the higher land and an area of lower wet land for summer grazing. The valuable sedge crop was taken out from the Fen by boat, as was the turf or peat. By 1820 the villagers were collecting butterflies, moths and bog plants to sell to collectors both locally and in London.

The shallow meres became silted up and landowners realised that if drained and cultivated their value would increase enormously. Ramsey, Ugg and Trundle Meres were all drained by the 1840's, wheat was cultivated for the first time, and their land value increased fourfold.

The coming of efficient steam power in the Victorian age made a huge difference to the whole of the fenland area. The wind-powered drainage mills were gradually replaced by steam powered pumps, often built alongside the old windmills. The steam pumps could be operated in any weather and when flooding was likely they often ran for days and nights on end. Local men became expert in running and managing the steam boilers and their pumps. Another advantage was that water could be lifted over a greater height from the field dykes into the main drains. It was now possible to consider draining the Whittlesea Mere, which was in the northern part  of the present Great Fen area. This Mere had become gradually shallower as surrounding areas were drained and it was ‘considered a dreadful nuisance’.

Read more about Whittlesea Mere

The coming of the railways

In 1850 the Great Northern Railway line was laid across the western side of Woodwalton parish and Holme Fen, described as ‘a quaking bog’. A branch line from Holme to Ramsey North was built in 1867, crossing the Great Fen area, which was mostly used to take agricultural produce away to new markets. Several of the farms in the Woodwalton area laid short tramways, as a way of moving produce over the light peat soils to barges, which then went on to a dock at Holme station or elsewhere.  The coming of the railways made a big difference to the farmers in the Great Fen area. The line finally closed in 1972.