The Fens: England's Drowned Uncanny
There is a quality of light in the Fens that does not exist anywhere else in England. It comes off the water — the drains, the rivers, the flooded fields in winter — and it flattens everything it touches. Horizons become ambiguous. The sky takes up more of the view than feels right. At dusk, or in the early morning, or in the particular grey of a November afternoon, the landscape seems to be doing something to time.
This is not a mystical claim. It is a perceptual one. The Fens — the great flat wetland that covers parts of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and Norfolk — are a landscape that disorients. And disorientation, in the history of folklore, is almost always where the stories begin.
What Are the Fens?
The Fens are a low-lying region of eastern England, much of it below sea level, kept dry by an elaborate system of drainage channels, sluices, and pumping stations that has been under continuous maintenance since the seventeenth century. Before that drainage — and, in patches, long before — the Fens were a wetland of extraordinary extent: a world of reed beds, shallow meres, raised islands of peat and clay, and seasonal floods that could make the interior of England briefly resemble the sea.
The great drainage of the 1630s and 1640s, engineered largely by the Dutch contractor Cornelius Vermuyden under the patronage of the Earl of Bedford, transformed the region from wetland to farmland. It was one of the largest engineering projects in English history, and it was deeply controversial. The Fenland communities who depended on the wetland for their livelihoods — fishing, fowling, reed cutting, turbary — resisted the drainage fiercely. The conflict between drainers and Fen people ran for decades, periodically turning violent.
What the drainage did to the landscape it also did, in a sense, to the folklore. A world of islands and water was replaced by a world of flat fields and straight channels. The creatures and stories of the old wetland went underground, or persisted at the margins, or survived in the place names that the new agricultural landscape inherited but no longer understood.
Will o' the Wisps and the Logic of Fenland Light
The most characteristic supernatural phenomenon of the Fens is the will o' the wisp — the mysterious light seen moving across marshy ground at night, variously known in the region as the lantern man, the hobby lantern, or Jack o' Lantern.
The rational explanation is well established: will o' the wisps are almost certainly ignited methane or phosphine gas, produced by the decomposition of organic matter in waterlogged ground, occasionally catching light and creating a brief, moving flame. The phenomenon is real, documented, and scientifically uncontroversial.
What is more interesting is what people made of it. Across Fenland tradition, the will o' the wisp is consistently portrayed as a deliberate, malicious intelligence — a light that leads travellers off the road and into the bog, that mimics a lantern carried by a person, that retreats when approached and advances when you turn away. The creature behind the light has various names and various forms, but its behaviour is consistent: it wants you off the path and into the water.
This is folklore doing its most practical work. The Fens were genuinely dangerous at night. The paths across the wetland were narrow and sometimes the only thing between a traveller and a drowning death. A tradition that taught people to mistrust unexpected lights in the dark, to stay on the known road, to be suspicious of anything that seemed to be guiding them away from the path — this was not superstition. It was accumulated local knowledge wearing a story's clothing.
The Drowned Country
The Fens have always been defined as much by what lies beneath them as by what is visible on the surface.
The drainage did not only drain water. It drained time. As the peat shrank and the water table dropped, the landscape began to give up its past — Bronze Age trackways, Iron Age settlements, Roman causeways, medieval field systems, all of them preserved in the anaerobic mud and exposed, gradually, as the ground dried out. The Fens are one of the richest archaeological landscapes in Britain partly because of what the water preserved, and partly because of what the drainage revealed.
This process has also surfaced the unexpected. Whole medieval villages that were abandoned after the drainage have left their traces — ghost patterns visible from the air, ridge and furrow under the modern fields, the stumps of what were once inhabited places. In some cases, entire parishes simply ceased to exist when the conditions that had sustained them for centuries were engineered away.
There is a persistent tradition in Fenland folklore of the sound of bells — church bells, rung from beneath the water. The story is usually attached to a specific location: a particular drain or mere that was the site of a drowned village or a lost church, and where, on certain nights, the bells can still be heard. Wicken Fen, Whittlesey Mere, the area around Crowland Abbey — all of these have their bell legends.
The bells are the drowned world making itself heard. They are also, like the will o' the wisps, a response to the particular character of Fenland sound. The flat landscape carries noise strangely. Water conducts vibration. In still conditions, sounds travel across the Fens in ways that seem to violate the rules of ordinary hearing. The medieval church bell that rings faintly at distance, transmitted across the water from a village three miles away, becomes, in the dark, something else entirely.
Hereward and the Resistance of the Marsh
The most significant figure in Fenland legend is Hereward — known in later tradition as Hereward the Wake, though the epithet is a later addition of uncertain origin.
Hereward was a real man, or at least a historical figure: an Anglo-Saxon landholder who led resistance against the Norman Conquest from a base on the Isle of Ely in the early 1070s. The historical record for Hereward is thin and contradictory, drawn from a twelfth-century Latin text called the Gesta Herewardi and a handful of other references that don't always agree with each other. But the legend that accumulated around him is substantial.
In the legend, Hereward is the last defender of English freedom — a guerrilla fighter who used the Fenland landscape as his weapon, retreating into the maze of waterways and reed beds where Norman cavalry could not follow, emerging to raid and then disappearing again into the marsh. The Isle of Ely, rising above the surrounding wetland, was his stronghold and the last hold-out of English resistance.
Whether the historical Hereward achieved anything like the legend claims is debatable. What is clear is that the legend served a purpose: it gave the Fenland a hero who was native to the landscape, who understood it as an outsider could not, whose power depended on knowing the paths through the bog. In a region whose identity was always bound up with the experience of being a world apart — geographically isolated, culturally distinct, periodically in conflict with outside authority — Hereward was the expression of that apartness given human form.
Charles Kingsley turned Hereward into a Victorian novel in 1866. The legend has been retold in various forms ever since. What persists across all the retellings is the marsh itself — the Fens as a place that resists conquest, that swallows armies, that keeps its own counsel.
Graham Swift and the Memory of Water
The literary treatment of the Fens that comes closest to their folkloric character is Graham Swift's novel Waterland, published in 1983.
Waterland is structured around the Fens as a landscape that refuses to stay in the past — that returns, floods, circles back, makes the present provisional. Its narrator, a history teacher called Tom Crick, understands the Fens as a place where time does not flow forward in the usual way, where the land is always in the process of being reclaimed and re-drowned, where the past is not finished.
This is not Swift's invention. It is the phenomenology of the Fens faithfully rendered. A landscape that was wetland, then farmland, then partially flooded again, that gives up its prehistory as the peat contracts, that still floods in the winters that the drainage system cannot quite contain — this is a landscape where the past is genuinely present in ways that most English landscapes are not. Swift found in the Fens a geography that matched the way memory actually works.
The folklore and the literature are doing the same thing. Both are attempts to account for a landscape that insists on its own strangeness, that does not resolve into the merely picturesque, that keeps its lights moving in the dark and its bells ringing from underwater.
Further Reading
- Waterland by Graham Swift
- The Fens by Francis Pryor
- Wicken Fen: The Making of a Nature Reserve by Natural England
- Gesta Herewardi — available in translation via the Rolls Series, free online
J.C. Aldred writes about the folklore, mythology and dark history of the British Isles at The Chalk & Thorn, published every Tuesday and Friday.