LITMIR.BIZ

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too was spared the depredations of our Victorian forebears. I wasn’t familiar with the town, and as I drove through its centre I was stunned by the fine Georgian houses which fringed the river along North Brink. I know now that this is possibly the finest Georgian streetscape in Britain.

      Once I was out of Wisbech and heading west, the signs told me I was thirty-four miles from Peterborough. Again the landscape changed. Between Lynn and Wisbech the Fens are more accurately known as Marshland. The landscape I had sped through on leaving Lynn had been formed by the sea. Storms and tides from the Wash have laid down thick layers of sandy-coloured silts, which are now among the most fertile arable soils in Europe. It’s a countryside of orchards, rose and garden-plant nurseries, and vegetables. More vegetables are grown in Marshland than anywhere else in Britain. Sometimes the stench of frosted cauliflowers on the air can be overpowering.

      West of Wisbech the Fens become different, and much darker. Spiritually darker too, I sometimes think. Before the widespread land drainage of the last three centuries, this was the haunt of Fen Tygers, those wild young men who wore their long hair in a pigtail and cherished their freedom to hunt and fish the common land and streams within their watery world. Out in the open fen there were huge expanses of water. Whittlesey Mere was the largest lake in Britain, before its drainage in 1852. Closer to the edge were sprawling woods of alder and willow. Here decomposing vegetation gave off methane gas, which spontaneously ignited to form the dreaded ‘corpse candles’ – which on drier land only formed in churchyards, above freshly filled graves. To outsiders it was a dark country in more ways than one.

      The Black Fens acquired their name because of their rich peat soils, which formed in pre-drainage times in a wide natural basin between the silts of Marshland to the east, and the higher ground of the fen edge to the west. For thousands of years peat grew and accumulated in this complex network of ponds, lakes, meres and creeks. Before their drainage, which took place mainly in the seventeenth century, the Black Fens were Britain’s largest natural wetland. It was a drowned landscape, but it was also a rich land. There was peat for fuel, reeds for thatch and huge numbers of duck, geese, eels and fish to eat. Elsewhere, in upland Britain, folk went hungry in winter, when protein was always in short supply. But never in the Fens.

      You can see a long way in a flat landscape. Perhaps the finest building in Britain, Ely Cathedral, high on its ‘island’ hill, can be seen from twenty miles away. Hence its local name, ‘the Ship of the Fens’. Peterborough Cathedral was built on lower-lying, less spectacular land, but it is still extremely impressive. These buildings were undoubtedly built to the glory of God, but the way they dominated – and still dominate – their landscapes leaves me in no doubt that they were also symbols of real political power down here on earth.

      I first caught sight of Peterborough Cathedral from ten miles away, as I drove out of the little village of Thorney. By now I was back on the main road, as I had no idea how to navigate my way through the narrow Fen lanes. I knew from past experience that it’s easy to get almost there in the Fens. You follow your nose, and arrive close to your destination, except that there’s a huge drainage ditch (or dyke, as they’re known in the Fens) blocking the way. And then you discover that the nearest bridge is ten miles away.

      Peterborough looked familiar as I drove towards the city centre. It was late afternoon and the sun was sinking behind the cathedral tower. Crows were calling to one another in the large trees of the Bishop’s Palace garden, as if they were getting ready for tea. Which would not be a bad idea, I thought, as I pulled into the car park outside the museum.

      Peterborough Museum is a fine stone building in Priestgate, the only street left which gives a feeling of what the old city would have been like. The rest was swept away – today we would say ‘redeveloped’, because it sounds nicer – when the main railway line arrived around 1850. The resulting prosperity carried all before it, including nearly every old building, except of course the churches. They couldn’t pull them down. As Bob Dylan once sang: ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears.’

      Inside the museum I was shown into the library, a tall, dark room lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. There was that wonderful booky, musty smell I had first encountered in the Myers Museum at school, and for a too-short moment I was transported back to my youth. The librarian showed me the shelves that held their archaeological titles. In amongst the dusty volumes I noticed a clean paperbound book with a green spine and the letters ‘RCHM’ in bold black type at top and bottom. Far from being a museum piece, this book, Peterborough New Town: A Survey of the Antiquities in the Areas of Development, had only been published the previous year. It was a survey by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, and I had been trying to get my hands on a copy for several weeks, but every bookshop I tried had sold out. I ignored the wisdom of the ages on the shelves all around me, and opened the book eagerly. The site I was interested in lay on the eastern fringes of the city, at the point where the dryland stopped and the once-wet fen started. It was known as Fengate (from two Norse words meaning ‘road to the fen’), and I wanted to know to what extent it would be affected by the New Town.

      It was immediately clear that most of Fengate would be destroyed by factories when work on the New Town started in earnest, in 1971 and 1972. Although I was sad for the people and buildings of Fengate, this threat of development meant that I stood a good chance of raising money from the British government, as well as from the ROM. Nowadays developers have to pay for any archaeological excavation their proposals might require, but in the early seventies it was up to government, local government or sometimes archaeological societies to fund such work. With dual sources of funding I might be able to carry out a large-scale open-area excavation. Maybe I’d get the chance to do a proper, wide-ranging project on a landscape which the Royal Commission report suggested would mainly be of pre-Roman date. My mind was racing. Could this be the site I had been looking for?

      I knew a bit about Fengate – every archaeology student in England knows a bit about Fengate, as it’s one of the key sites of British prehistory. It was Fengate that produced those Late Neolithic Peterborough pots. The sherds of pottery that gave the Peterborough Culture its name were found in hand-dug gravel pits that had been worked in the first three decades of the century. What I had to know now was simple: was anything left? Had the gravel pits destroyed everything? I was itching to find out.

      The librarian told me that the museum was about to close, and the car park would be locked up in fifteen minutes. I still hadn’t answered those key questions, and was almost exploding with frustration; but at least I now had the book safely secured in my briefcase. This time I drove across the Fens to King’s Lynn and my lodgings in North Elmham using the most direct route possible. I don’t think I have ever driven so fast, or with such abandon, before or since.

      I took the stairs three at a time and leapt onto the bed, as there was nowhere else to sit. I started to read, and rapidly the truth began to dawn. What a site! It was extraordinary. I couldn’t believe it. The meticulous survey showed that the hand-dug gravel quarry pits were confined to about a quarter of the area of Fengate, and the rest of the prehistoric landscape lay out there, untouched. Intact. And what a landscape it was. I had never seen anything like it before. I was aware that I must be looking at one of the richest archaeological areas in the country. Even the Royal Commission, never noted for extravagant hyperbole, enthused: ‘This area shows massive evidence for occupation from the Neolithic period onwards …’ I lay back and stared at the ceiling. I couldn’t believe it. I had hit the jackpot.

       CHAPTER THREE A Trans-Atlantic Commuter

      I NOW FOUND MYSELF in a strange situation: I was an Englishman working in England for a foreign institution. I was resident – and indeed taxed – abroad, but most of my team were British. After the initial exploratory expedition of 1970 I returned to Canada for the winter, and drew up proposals for a five-year project which would examine all the land threatened by the expansion of the New Town. Although our main funding was from Canada and the British government, the local authority (in this instance the New Town Development Corporation) also provided us with essential help in kind, which included accommodation, storage facilities and the like.

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