Pymoor - Fen Roads

This picture shows the road to Welney to the north of the area shown on the sketch map.  On the left is the bank behind which is the Hundred Foot or New Bedford River.  To the right the flat lands of the "South Level" of the fens which extend to the higher ground around the town and USAF base at Mildenhall.

This picture may well have been taken in the area described at the end of the following passage:

First fundamental of road construction over the peat is to exploit the mineral soil of the islands as far as possible.  The present Cambridge-Lynn road passes through the heart of the black land, but is on peat for only eight miles between the Cambridgeshire highland at Waterbeach and the Norfolk highland at Fordham as a result of exploiting the island mineral soils of Ely, Littleport and Southery.

Until fairly recently the second fundamental, particularly with undrained or only partly drained peat, has been the use of faggots as foundation.  Ordinary rubble was useless for this purpose since it sank through the waterlogged peat as through quicksand.  And while in less marshy conditions clunch and chalk might be used even without faggots, (since chalk absorbs water and is soft enough to work in with the unresisting peat in a way foreign to Iimestone or sandstone), I fancy these were not so used on any large scale until at least the seventeenth century. Until this time, and often enough after it, faggoting was essential.

Only in exceptional circumstances is faggoting used nowadays.  The main reason is that the fens are no longer waterlogged; it is also true that macadamised fen roads, tougher and more cohesive than unmetalled roads, seem able to float themselves just as well over dry peat soil as faggoted roads once floated over wet.  But there are still times when present-day engineers come up against the bottomless conditions so familiar to their predecessors; and when this happens they also must have recourse to faggoting.  Contractors laying a concrete road by the side of the South Level Barrier Bank north of Pymoor in 1928 came to a point where they could not strike bottom - and had to solve their difficulty as the Britons and Romans had done before them, by laying a faggot foundation before putting their road on top.

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