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Location: Burwell Fen and WickenProject Title: Oral HistoriesProject Description: Recollections of living and working on the land gathered through interviewsCollector: Dr. Richard IrvineCollection Date: Collection Details: These oral histories were collected during the Pathways project in order to gain a sense of how people saw their environment changing over the course of their lives. They include details about people's memories of living and working on the land, and how they interacted with the landscape. They are provided here to give a sense of the region as it has transformed over time and to highlight key themes in how people interpret the region's environmental history.
What do I remember from when I was a child?
Well I can tell you all about chapel,
we used to go to the chapel.
That’s the chapel at Burwell Fen,
it’s disused now except for the Harvest Service that happens every year of course.
I tell people, I used to go to chapel 5 times on a Sunday. How was that possible, they ask?
Well, I’d go to Sunday school,
then the morning service, then afternoon Sunday school, and the service after that, then the evening service. People would often just go for something to do. It’s cheaper than the pub, they’d say.
[Question about flood memories]
When the floods were up, and this was especially the case in 1947,
me and my mother were advised to get out and so we went on to Wicken.
But my father stayed behind even though the water was up and the fields were just like lakes. You’d think you were at sea.
The thing is, people do talk about the fens being water, but that’s not really the case is it, mostly the fens are dry but with a lot of waterways.
And if there is water, when it floods, then you really do know about it because the water just covers everything. So the dry, that’s what’s normal and the water is what’s abnormal. I mean, these days of course.
If the fens are watery, then you’re talking an emergency. So when people say oh the fens are all wet, I say they don’t know what they’re talking about.
[Question about peat] Well of course you’ve got the lovely peat soil in Burwell, black as black as anything.
But if you’re asking about peat that hasn’t been drained,
there’s none of that really now other than at the National Trust at Wicken Fen.
Although its strange that on fenland, where there’s a hill, it’s wet, and that’s because that’s where the peat is raised,
and where it’s low that’s where it’s drained and blown away. Of course if it’s hills you’re wanting, there are all kinds of bumps and hills on the road. You know what I mean? You take a lovely straight fen road, and the peat’s shrinking underneath so already you’ve got one or two little bumps and holes in the road, I say little bumps, then you get a 20 tonne truck and that makes it better, then there you go, you’ve got a whacking great hill and a valley!
People would cut the peat,
although that mostly stopped before the [Second World] War.
Though I do remember it from my childhood
being cut still
but for blacksmiths
rather than for what you might call household use, it gives a lovely low heat, lower than coal, and so they’d use it so the fire wouldn’t be so intense for their hammering. Probably the last cutting was in the 1960s? I’d be surprised if anybody was really doing it into the 1970s, though there was a programme on Anglia called Bygones which had footage of peat digging near enough in Burwell fen and that would have been possibly early in the 80s but you know the show was called Bygones for a reason!
We were one of the first to have sugar
beet, we planted it the second year the factory opened, though at the end we were mostly growing carrots and parsnips. And you’d be ploughing
and you’d get bog oaks there terrible. They’d go from here to there, wherever there is. Like iron. They say they all lie the same way, but I never found that. They’re not like oaks today, they were very close together.