Ghost Species

I have lived in Cambridge, on the western brink of East Anglia, for about thirteen years now. It is a town that has almost no connection with the countryside that surrounds it. It sits as aloofly on its landscape as a bubble on grass. And for nearly a decade of these thirteen years, East Anglia was somewhere I avoided, on the presumption that its terrain held no interest for me. If I travelled in search of adventure or excitement in Britain, I always pushed north, away to the mountains and coasts of Cumbria, Northumberland and Scotland.

Over the past three or four years, however, I have begun to travel east instead of north from Cambridge. I’ve been to the salt marshes and mudflats of the Dengie Peninsula in Essex, where I spent a late-summer night sleeping out on the grassy sea wall, while hundreds of migrating geese barked and honked overhead in the darkness. To the Martian landscape of the north Norfolk coast, where the clear air plays tricks with perspective, so that thirty-foot-high dunes appear like mountain ranges. To the vulnerable coastline of Suffolk, where the sea is biting dozens more yards from the land each year and forcing the cliffs to yield up their contents: the bones of ancient dead, Second World War weaponry, Palaeolithic flint tools.

Once an anthropologist friend of mine, who specializes in the death rituals of Amazonian tribes, took me to the sandy ling-lands of north Suffolk, where two years previously he had buried the body of his father among the heather and rabbit warrens, before marking the site with a stone the size of a tortoise’s shell. As we stood by the stone, my friend told me that he was planning to give the worms another two years before he dug up his father’s skull, with a view to keeping it on his desk while he worked. ‘I’ll put a candle in it, I think,’ he said to me. ‘Or perhaps near it; perhaps just by the side of it.’

But the strangest of all these strange East Anglian subregions is undoubtedly the Fens. The Fens are a low-lying area of around 1,200 square miles in area. Geologically speaking, they are bounded to the west by the limestone hills of the Midlands, to the south and south-east by the chalk of Cambridgeshire and the sand of Suffolk, and elsewhere by the sea. To their immediate north, the east coast of England is punched inwards by the square fist of the Wash.

The Fens were once mostly water. In the ninth century, a Viking fleet could still sail as far inland as Ely. Until well into the 1600s, much of the Fens was a network of brackish swamps and reed beds, interspersed with islands and causeways of raised but marshy ground. The human inhabitants of this world were amphibious: travelling in punts, living in houses raised on stilts and surviving by fishing, cutting willow, reeds and peat, geese-keeping and wildfowling.

In the 1620s, however, the Dutch hydro-engineer Cornelius Vermuyden, already renowned for his success in dyking the Thames at Dagenham, was employed by the Duke of Bedford to turn the Fens ‘into a sea of waving corn’. So began the draining of the Fens with davit, dyke and windmill: a process that would take more than 150 years, but which revealed hundreds of thousands of acres of the most voluptuously rich soil in England. A soil so fertile, Fen farmers say, that if you stoop and scoop up a handful you’ll grow three more fingers before you’ve cast it down.

The Fens’ terraqueous past is still visible in contemporary maps, most obviously in the generic names common in the region: the Sluices and the Bridges, the Lodes, Leams and Dykes, the Drains and the Mills. It is there, too, in place names such as Ely – which means ‘island of the eels’ – or Methwold Hythe: ‘Hythe’, from the Old English, meaning a small haven or landing-place on a river (visible too in London’s Rotherhithe and Lambeth, which was once ‘Lamb-Hithe’), though no river now flows through Methwold Hythe.

It was to Methwold Hythe that Justin and I were heading that morning. ‘The Hythe’, as the older people who live there call it, is an ancient village on the eastern edge of the Fens, just before the peat gives way to sand. In the late seventeenth century, after Vermuyden had done his work, a few miles’ travel north and west would have taken you into the thick of the blue-black loamy Fens. But travelling a few miles east and south would have brought you into the Brecklands, England’s Arabia Deserta, an area of caramel-coloured sand so extensive that an inland lighthouse was once erected to orient travellers, and so unstable that in 1688 a prolonged south-westerly wind caused the sand to form into a marching dune that buried a village and choked a river.