[ Pymoor Home Page ]
Three hundred years ago the fens were a little like the Florida everglades, a huge area of very low lying land. They drain into the large squarish bite out of the eastern coast of England, called the Wash, about a third of the way up towards Scotland. The first successful attempts at drainage of the area were started in the 1640s. Today the fens are mainly highly productive agricultural land.
If you look at the small map (It's a link to a bigger version which will open in a separate window.) almost none of the land shown is more than five metres above mean sea level. Although Pymoor is some 30 miles from the sea the centre of the village is still only 3 metres above mean sea level. Much of the surrounding fen is actually below the zero contour. Even at three metres above it means that at every high tide the village would be well under water if the river banks failed as they did in parts of the Fens in 1947.
Examine the Parallel lines of the Old Bedford and New Bedford Rivers running roughly north-east to south-west close to Pymoor. (Easier to do on the scrollable map!) These are the "cuts" first made in the mid 1600s which joined the Great Ouse River with the sea at King's Lynn, and helped to drain the fens.
The first of these, now called the Old Bedford River, was named after the Duke of Bedford, who with a number of "Advenurers" - we'd call them venture capitalists now - funded the the construction of these new rivers. The original intention was to provide dry summer grazing for cattle. It was not entirely successful and later a more ambitious project to provide permanent drainage was commenced. This led to the construction of the New Bedford River, also known as the Hundred Foot River, because that was the distance between the tops of the two embankments either side of it.
The area between these rivers is above sea level. During the winter, between January and March, this 20 mile long and 3/4 mile wide area of "washes" are flooded. So large is the catchment area these rivers must cope with and so small the drop to the sea that the water cannot escape fast enough between each high tide. If it was not allowed to flow into the washes it would flood the rest of the Fens.
These days the washes are managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as a reserve, hence the wading bird symbols in this area. The RSPB has a major visitors centre near Welney, on the road between Gold Hill and Hilgay Fen. The road across the washes at Welney is regularly flooded - on average for 22 days a year - and becomes impassable. A 30 mile detour is then needed either to Mepal, in the south, where there is a modern viaduct over the washes or north to Denver where there are huge sluice gates and pumps, which control water levels and flow thoughout the middle and southern levels of the fens.
There's been an Abbey or Cathedral at nearby Ely for around 1,500 years. Ely and its cathedral occupies the highest ground for miles around. It's even possible to see it from Pymoor, in spite of the fact that the hill on which the village of Little Downham stands is in between. Because of the way it's always visible over the local flat landscape, it has long been known as the "Ship of the Fens". A more recent claim to visibility is because it appeared on the front cover of Pink Floyd's "Division Bell" album, published in 1994. (The band had its origins in Cambridge, just twelve miles south of Ely.) If you looked carefully you could see the cathedral between the two halves of a huge mask. These were erected on the land near Stuntney to the south-east of the city.
[ Top of Page ]
In fact it is more complicated than that. Although local farmers will often refer to removing "gault" from the ditches surrounding their fields, geological maps of the area show that Pymoor sits on three different clays, none of them gault. Although gault is found in other fenland areas, the bulk of Pymoor is on Boulder Clay. There is a strip of this clay, which peters out at Pymoor, sticking out from under the sands and gravels of the high ground on which Little Downham is built. The boulder clay itself sits on a thin band of Ampthill Clay and there are narrow fringes of it around the edges of Pymoor where the ground falls away into the large areas of Nordelf Peat, which stretch for miles around. The third clay is Kimmeridge Clay. This is found in a small area to the north of the Recreation Ground and east of Straight Furlong.
[ Top of Page ]