Q&A with Ian Rotherham, Professor of Environmental Geography and Reader in Tourism and Environmental Change

Ian Rotherham (centre) with David Bellamy (r) and Ted Green (l), in Sheffield, 2010

I am today posting the first interview for this new blog, which is devoted to the part of eastern England known as the Fens, and to the people who inhabit, and have inhabited, the area. An introduction to the blog can be read here. 

This interview is with Professor Ian Rotherham, who researches environmental, historical and tourism issues around the world, and chairs national and international meetings and committees. He has written and edited around 40 books, over 500 academic papers and articles, and edits the Arboricultural Journal. His research on landscape history has led to a ground-breaking handbook on ancient woodland heritage, and a series of books on wetland loss and the history of peat and peat cutting. 

Professor Rotherham is especially interested in peatlands and fenlands – both their history and ecology in a changing countryside and hence the implications for things like biodiversity loss and climate resilience. He is the author of The Lost Fens: England’s Greatest Ecological Disaster. 

The interview begins … 

Q: I realise your interest in the Fens is wider than just East Anglia, but where would you set the borders of the Fens of East Anglia, which I think are mainly viewed as being situated in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, plus parts of Norfolk and Suffolk. Can one define a precise geographical boundary? If so, where would you set it and why? 

A: I think I would call Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire, plus parts of Norfolk and Suffolk – ‘The Southern Fens’ i.e., the region popularly known and recognised as ‘The Fens’.  

The ‘Northern Fens’ is the region from North Lincolnshire through South Yorkshire, parts of East Yorkshire, and into North Yorkshire around ‘Lake Pickering’. 

The boundaries are a little fuzzy since in medieval times for instance, there would be extensive marshland, heaths and commons, open grassland on the Wolds and Brecks, and inland sand dunes too.  

Q: What in your view is most distinctive about the Fens? In what ways is it/was it special and why? 

A: Many different aspects make these special areas – from perception and atmosphere to history and ecology. These are ‘big sky’ landscapes with open expansive views – which are maintained even today in the intensively farmed countryside. Visit the Fens in late autumn with the sun setting on a misty afternoon and the church spires picking out the medieval settlements and this captures the special nature of the area which you get nowhere else.

The communities too reflect their environment, landscape, and history; and even today in the modern world seem to connect back to closeness with nature. Historically the links to local countryside and nature were determinants which non-fenlanders would find difficult to understand in this peculiar region of neither land nor water but something in-between.  

Q: What would you say were the three most significant events and dates for the Fens and its inhabitants, and why? 

A: I think firstly 1066 and the Norman Conquest when the fenlanders with Hereward the Wake were amongst the last Saxons to be suppressed. 

Second would be the rise of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians resulting in the English Civil War and all that followed. This was in part triggered by disputes over land ownerships and drainage – and after the war was won, Cromwell drained the Fens anyway……so probably 1630, which was the date when the serious business of drainage The Great Level began in earnest by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden. 

Thirdly would be a broad sweep rather than a specific date from around the 1700s to about 1940s when ‘land improvement’ under parliamentary acts of enclosure was undertaken across the region and with final major drainage being the World War Two schemes around Wicken Fen.     

Q: What would you say were the three (or four) people who have had the most impact on the Fens and/or the wider world, and why? 

A: Sir Cornelius Vermuyden – for obvious reasons, but up there with King Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. 

Charles Rothschild – for his pioneering work with National Trust and establishing the first Fenland nature reserves. 

Sir Peter Scott for setting up the Wildfowl Trust (now Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust) and changing attitudes to the Fens.

Sir Harry Godwin, Professor H.C. Darby, and James Wentworth-Day – each in different ways but for their evocative and insightful writings about the Fens. 

John Clare because his poetry captured the essence of the old fens and the impacts (first-hand) of enclosure.  

Pros and cons 

Q: What in your view are the pros and cons of the Fens having been drained? 

A: It was an amazing political manoeuvre which took power and resources from local commoners and into the hands of a few privileged individuals. Certain types of productivity – mostly arable farming – increased dramatically but these were already incredibly productive landscapes anyway.  

This is too big a subject to cover here – but we are now in the process of paying the price with flood risk and pre-industrial but on-going carbon release that was at least in part a trigger for current climate change.  

Q: Apart from the famous Holme Posts, what would you point to as the two or three most graphic examples of the impact that the draining of the Fens has had? 

A: The often unnoticed ‘theft of the fens’ – the taking of the commons from the commoners…… 

Q: Do we have any real sense of how the Fens looked before they were drained? Is there a particular picture or illustration that you would point me to/share with me? 

A: I used some pictures in the ‘Lost Fens’ as I do in presentations, but these are all from other areas as the major changes happened prior to the availability of prints etc. 

Some of the Whittlesey prints give an impression of what was happening but only a taste of what the landscape was like before that. 

Q: Much has been made over the years of the assertion that the people of the Fens had and have a distinctive character, best exemplified perhaps by the way people refer to the so-called Fen Tigers, who resisted the draining of The Fens. Can one really talk of a distinctive Fen character? Have the Fens and the people who inhabit/have inhabited the area perhaps tended to be over romanticised? 

A: I think we have two elements to this – the first being the rather closed communities of the pre-drainage landscapes, then the people of the modern post-drainage Fens – and yes, I think this bred a distinctive suite of characters which has been lost or diluted in recent decades. 

I have talked with descendants of the local fenlanders and also to those whose ancestors were Dutch and came over to drain the fens back in the 1600s. I think the character is through connection to place, the wet countryside, to nature, and the working of that landscape / waterscape to eke out a livelihood. 

Different and distinctive

Q: There are a number of projects today focused on restoring and re-creating the Fens – including the Great Fen project. What are the advantages of doing this? Is it a “nice to have” development, or a necessity? Is it possible that such schemes have come too late to have a meaningful impact? 

A: These are ‘must have’ projects though they will need to be even bigger, bolder, better and more joined. Former fenland peat soils are eroding rapidly and land is subsiding – which with increased flooding, sea-level rise, and climate change, is a recipe for disaster. So we need to learn to farm wet landscapes better – As we did in the past. 

However, this will be a move to wetter futurescapes and not a return to the past fenland. The Fens were deeply culture landscapes where fenmen and fenwomen worked with nature and this produced a unique landscape and its biodiversity and a very special people. 

Because of a process called ‘cultural severance’ this will never return and without it, the fen will be different and distinctive from the old fens which existed before.      

Q: What are the implications of climate change for the Fens? 

A: Reinstating, re-wetting and rewilding the former fens but as effective working countryside rather than as nature reserve museums is a key challenge, and one that can help us address the major challenges of climate change. 

However, there is still a long way to go before politicians and other decision-makers wake up to the scale of change required. Furthermore, working with farmers and other landowners is the key to success in any future visions.    

A: Ok, thank you very much for taking the time to answer my questions.