I have been working on some draft short stories about the Fens for a year or so, but I have struggled to find the time to wrap them up, so I’m putting together a series of vignettes that might be useful to me further down the road.
The Cambridgeshire Fens are as flat as a pancake. That isn’t just a cliche, it’s a fact. There are no distant hills to speak of and the monotony is broken only occasionally by an unattractive farm house, a tree, an old shed or a new wind turbine. Church steeples are rare because Fenland is a new place with very soft geology. The exception is the Isle of Ely with its stumpy cathedral that survived the last war because aviators on both sides used it for navigation.
Photographers are taught to take photographs in which the subject fills the frame. Perhaps that’s why the iconic images of the Fens always feature the cathedral, a pumping station or a house. But that’s not what the Fens are about or why I have learned to love them.
Let’s strip back our view to the point where photographers run home screaming. Let’s make a picture postcard of the landscape as it really is. You can buy blank postcards or just fold a page of A4 paper in half.
To create your basic Fenland landscape, you need to draw a dead straight line across the card a third of the way up from the bottom.
You have almost finished, so now you just need to colour it in. The bottom third will be green or black and the rest will be sky; perhaps blue or grey.
I find that view really satisfying. Maybe because I am long-sighted, I like sky-scapes, but if I add a few clouds, a sunset or sunrise, a rainbow, a Turner squall or a moonrise, I will have fallen into the trap of ignoring the ground-scape.
So let’s focus on the bottom third.
Composition-wise, you already have a masterpiece. Any addition will wreck it, but you need to make something more of the soggy peat-fields that make up the basis of the fens. If you can cope, let’s draw another line.
Sticking with the principle of thirds, let’s draw a line from a third of the way across the bottom of the page to the horizon.
Aesthetics dictate that your line can go straight up to the horizon, or to the middle point, or to a point a third of the way from your right hand margin. It’s up to you. Try them out.
The line you have created might be a road or a ditch, but it won’t be a hedge. You need to taper it to give an idea of perspective.
And so you have finished. Anything else you see will be peripheral and temporary.
Why this landscape of thirds is so satisfying to many of us could be the subject of much discussion and a lot of controversy but let me pitch my opinion.
My view of the Fens is essentially a seascape. British families drag themselves to the seaside in road-jamming millions on each public holiday, yet very few of us go into the water. I think the attraction is the landscape of thirds. We just need to get an uninterrupted, uncluttered view of the horizon and to perhaps marvel at the curvature of the earth. After spending months hemmed in by walls, our eye muscles need to relax and our brain needs to encounter infinity. It certainly is therapeutic and rejuvenating for us and our canine pets. Adults, past their prime, frolic on the shore like adolescents, often nursing pulled muscles and scorched skin in the way home.
We need space to breathe and to gain perspective, or perhaps to lose it. We need to break free for a few hours, but why?
Our species probably originated in the flat savannah of Africa a couple of million years ago. Our brains were programmed during our time in the wilderness by natural selection. Those of us who failed to notice the details of our environment didn't live long and didn't get time to pass on our genes. Environmental awareness was programmed into us, as was the ability to recognise faces and differentiate between a subject and its background. Our front-facing, stereoscopic vision was crucial in this respect.
Today, we spend most of our time hemmed in by walls, looking at a screen that is less than a metre away. As we age, we find we need spectacles to focus on subjects that are this close, though we can still see the sky, the sea, the moon and the stars unaided. But close-work is essential to our survival now. We need to be literate, numerate, web-savvy and probably able to write code. This stage in our evolution is almost inevitable but it ignores our evolutionary need to just stare into infinity.
To me, this explains why so many of us head for the hills, the coast or perhaps the fens, to get an unobstructed view of the earth we live on.
I’d love to see anyone’s take on a Fenland Postcard. Please send them to jim2stevenson@gmail.com .
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