How One Family Wiped England's Biggest Wetland Off the Map: The Fens

For thousands of years, the Fens of East Anglia were a vast, shimmering labyrinth of reed beds, meres, and winding waterways stretching across Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and Norfolk. It was a world apart, where communities fished for eels, hunted wildfowl, cut peat, and lived by the rhythm of the water as their ancestors had for centuries. Then, in the 1630s, the 4th Earl of Bedford looked at this living wilderness and saw only wasted land. He hired the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to do what had never been attempted on such a scale: drain an entire landscape and turn it into profit. The locals did not go quietly. The "Fen Tigers" fought back with everything they had, breaking dykes, wrecking sluices, and sabotaging the works under cover of darkness to defend the only way of life they had ever known. But they were fighting money, power, and the Crown, and they lost. Drain by drain, the wetland vanished, until the last great lake, Whittlesey Mere, was pumped dry in 1851, erasing the largest body of fresh water in lowland England from the map forever. This is the story of how a single noble family and a Dutch engineer reshaped a region, creating England's richest farmland in the process. But the land has paid a terrible price. As the peat dried and shrank, the ground began to sink, and the iron posts at Holme Fen now show that it has dropped by metres since the draining. Today, the most fertile soil in England is slowly sinking below sea level, held back from the water by pumps that can never be switched off.