The Straight Story

Photo: Jo Sinclair

I want to see something new, a dramatic landscape not too far from home. The furthest reaches of the Fens are a foreign land to me, so I invite two friends to explore. The Ouse Washes RSPB is a starting point. Mapped out like a tuning fork, satellite shots show two parallel slivers of water surrounded by floodplain.

To get there we travel slowly over fen roads. Making a switchback from Ely we negotiate cambers, bumps, hollows and potholes, past waterways engineered straight as arrows, pointing towards a silty patchwork of black soil. Towards drills of racing fluorescent winter wheat and fields white with swans. Towards skeletal windblown houses gaping with holes. Towards grassland under water: the Washes, thronging with birds. Plan your journey in rainy seasons; the A1101 near Welney can be cut off for weeks by floodwater. Could this become more common? Rising sea levels could mean inundation by the end of the century. Best go now.

The Ouse Washes is a system of rivers, ditches and banks engineered nearly 400 years ago. Floodwater is able to disperse over an adjoining strip of grassland, narrow and twenty miles long. It provides perfect conditions for wetland birds and is managed by conservation charities the RSPB, Wildlife Trust and Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust. In winter ducks, geese and swans flock here to find protection and forage. Picture the days when the birds were harvested in their thousands, like huge trawls of fish.

From the RSPB visitor centre we walk the southern riverside, an embankment towering defiantly above. Ten bird hides are perched on top of the bank, dotted along a two kilometre stretch. Screens and steps mean a discreet invasion. The furthest hide, with views direct across the floodwater to Ely Cathedral, is our favourite today. We see the 'ship of the Fens' in many shades of grey and winter storm.

The view engrosses us for hours. Birds gather like clouds. Lapwings, golden plovers, ducks and swans pass over. They flock, part and cluster in puddles and rafts. It rains birds. I strain my eyes trying to differentiate mallard, tufted duck, shelduck, shoveler, pochard, pintail. There are redshanks and bouncing groups of linnets in the foreground.

Ian and Mel make charcoal sketches of the scene. Carbon marks peat, air and water on the page.

Startled by the  predatory flight of a marsh harrier a nervous surge of smuts and smudges rises and falls. Iron filing birds are lacquered by embers of late sunlight, but on this dim day I mostly have to imagine the colours and markings of these beautiful birds.

We plan to return in spring. I want a day of sunshine and storm and bird plumage in sharper focus. It will be breeding time for rarities such as ruff and avocet and black tailed godwit. Maybe I'll see a crane one day, over a metre tall, with its long legs, bustle and haunting call.

Culture notes:
Melanie Max paints East Anglian waterscapes in oil and offers workshops on her narrowboat. I bought a tiny painting from her. When I'm out I disappear into the landscape. When at home I can disappear into this painting's watery world.

From my bookshelf, for lyrical enlightenment on the subject of the Fens: Tim Dee's non-fiction book Four Fields. Fields are 'the greatest land art on the globe' Dee declares. He travels to Chernobyl, Montana and Zambia to give this some thought. But he also concentrates on his regular birding patch where he lives at the edge of the Cambridgeshire fens. Here he takes a journey below sea level writing a cross-cultural commentary on the wild and the man-made. 'How then could we best live with the fens in the future? Might we redefine our tenancy over that which we have subjugated?', he asks.

Fred Ingrams paints vivid landscapes of the desolate East Anglian fens. Blazes of light are reflected in his enduring subject, the drainage ditch. Vegetable harvests of purple broccoli and orange carrots and pumpkins make lurid mountains in the flatlands. I'd like to buy one...

One day.