Either side of the train, flat black soil, landscape at its purest – land, and a scape unbroken until it met the sky. Regular ditches to drain the black peat, and now and then a blockhouse where a pump lifted the ditch water to the rod-straight rivers running to the huge North Sea sluices beyond the world’s curving. Nothing to see here but flatness merging into sky as the storm-winds that buffeted the train blew away the peat-soil, taking with it the relics of all its past seasons, blowing the carbon out ever since we dreamed of a new future for this place. On the train we sat together with our mobile phones and ignored that past, that present and that future. My seat companion watched a video on eyebrow tattooing. How many on that train hurtling towards the future by way of the Anthropocene (stopping at March, all change at Peterborough) knew those histories, or saw the landscape as more than just a surface out there beside the train? Black, flat, monotonous, hypnotic, choose your word and check your phone again. Four or five metres of black peat gone, oxidised, blown away and with it millennia of fenland landscape history.
This is the landscape I grew from. My family came from the Fens and Great Yarmouth. To me they are beautiful. I mourn their desecration. I mourn the whole intricate web of life that the few seek to pluck us from. Thank you for your continued insight, for recording something so difficult and important.
Published on World Wetlands Day eh Richard ?
This is the landscape I grew from. My family came from the Fens and Great Yarmouth. To me they are beautiful. I mourn their desecration. I mourn the whole intricate web of life that the few seek to pluck us from. Thank you for your continued insight, for recording something so difficult and important.