#Fenland

[kvetch19]

Morton's Leam, an ancient fenland drain

[frowny-clowny]

Miserable rn but at least this creek is flowing

[themidnightscholar]

Fenlands Folklore

The Tale of Tiddy Mun

In a time long forgotten, like a whisper travelling through the mist across the old lands of The Fens is the tale of Tiddy Mun.

Legend has it that Tiddy Mun was a land spirit who managed the waters and mists, a balanced creature, neither good or evil, as most of nature is. Until something comes along and disrupts that balance and this common-folk marshland spirit is forced to correct it, with a little dash of vengeance for good measure too!

The Fens was once vast wet land. Similar to the formidable Nile wet crops of ancient Egypt and home to a plethora of wonderful waterfowl and beautiful plant life, some of which can only inhabit this rare type of land worldwide.

It was this land that was home to the Tiddy Mun. A short creature with long white hair and a long white beard that roamed through the misty reeds at night tending to the marshes. They say that when the Fennish people’s plights had been heard and offerings accepted, you would hear the shrilling cry of the Peewit bird across the still midnight air from Tiddy Mun himself.

But in the eighteenth century the wealthy people of England, corrupt by power and greed forced the drainage of the beautiful and bountiful Fens to make way for industrialised agriculture. The Fennish common folk, akin to many other aboriginal people, fought ferociously for many years for their way of life and way of the land. But that was nothing compared to the wrath of Tiddy Mun.

Many of the elite outsiders, invaders to their own country, went out into the marshes never to be seen again, drowned in the boggy waters by Tiddy Mun. One after the other, after the other, after the other lost to the depths of the marsh but they kept coming and kept draining until cursed pestilence struck across the unrecognisable land.

The poor common folk pleaded and prayed to Tiddy Mun, left out their offerings but the Peewit cry never came…

Here and now in 2024, the Peewit or more commonly known as the Lapwing has seen signs of return to the UK Midlands, where minor but significant efforts have started to restore some of the wetlands of The Fens. Perhaps also to restore the strength and return of Tiddy Mun.

Note: Anyone interested in the restoration projects should check out The Great Fen Project and The National Wildlife Trust and anyone interested in the history of The Fens should check out Imperial Mud by James Boyce, I couldn’t put it down 😊

[thefollyflaneuse]

The Arbour, Peckover House, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire

In the 18th century Bank House in Wisbech became home to the Peckover family, and as well as providing a family home it housed their banking business, which became a great success. Over time they acquired further land and extended the gardens behind the adjacent properties, and built garden buildings including this striking summerhouse. In 1943 the house and grounds were given to the National…

[ohulancutash]

This website is full of comics from very amazing artists, who also didn't go through a phase of being deeply attached to putting a weird grainy sepia filter over all of their drawings. This is not that, obviously, but I found this little story in the same set of old files and... well I like it.

[smellycatcreations]

Just finished these discs which are a cool idea, being used for a local metal detecting clubs charity event. @thefendigger #metaldetecting #metaldetectinguk #fenland #thefens #Norfolk (at King's Lynn, Norfolk) https://www.instagram.com/p/CkGLnyLjPAV/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[wayfarersblog]

Fenlands, the webcomic I made with my lovely partner Sari is now printed in Finnish! Our dog Naava just wanted to be included.

For those who speak English, go and check out the whole comic in fenlandscomic.com! It's a good old Victorian horror story, telling a story of Aisling, an Irish immigrant worker and a medium who has to face eldritch horrors with her trusty cat. It's not too long a read and the whole story was finished in 2022!

[scavengedluxury]

[zr-art-world]

some doodles of twst oc

yuu in a different outfit, kid Yuu, Rielle, zain, twst Flounder (not named yet, and Zolio

[ancat-dubh]

finally repotted my oak sapling I grew from a sprouting acorn gifted in autumn by one of my favourite trees in my old holy grounds! it’s been slowly cooking all winter and stayed mostly this size past few months in the tiny pot that came with me in my January move. I’ve been doing a long, divination-led working with it all through winter and the city change – think I’m gonna plant it here once it’s bigger and I’ve got a better sense for my future in the place.

[thorns-ofthe-thistle]

The Royal Wedding of Crowned Prince Thistle of the Fenlands and Lady Wendy Darling Alice Kingsleigh-Liddel the Exceptional and Michael Darling, Son of Suns

Oh, Father tell me, do we get what we deserve? Whoa, we get what we deserve

And way down we go Way down we go Say way down we go Way down we go

You let your feet run wild Time has come as we all go down Yeah but for the fall, Oh, my Do you dare to look him right in the eyes?

Oh, 'cause they will run you down, down 'til the dark Yes and they will run you down, down 'til you fall And they will run you down, down 'til you go Yeah, so you can't crawl no more

And way down we go Way down we go Say way down we go Oh, 'cause they will run you down, down 'til you fall...

@the-dashing-darling, @go-askalice

[cocteautwinslyrics]

learning about the history of wood cover in great britain. i am blaming the romans for a considerable part of this.

[fendrieneu]

Is there too much tinkering with time trials?

It’s been a week of time trial musings for me, culminating in this post. I watched the revised Paris-Nice time trial with a keen eye. It was really enjoyable to see how the tactics evolved and rather than weaker teams being handicapped by having to get four riders from gun to tape, they could ride it like a team sprint on the track. What it also did was stop a dominant TTT team from…

[truthundressing]

Louis hates the east of england soooo bad :(

[approximately-32-leafcutter-ants]

whenever i talk with professional strangers i automatically either distinctly raise mu voice higher or lower it much deeper and it is me cosplaying a human person and i dont know how to not do that. do i just not raise my voice and then be me??? but me is not a profesional?? i dunno it just is odd that i talk to the dishwasher repair guy with a deep as heck voice and i talk to the water district commissioner with a high pitched voice

[fixomnia-scribble]

WOW.

Scientists found an amazingly well-preserved village from 3,000 years ago

Text below, in case article access dries up:

LONDON — A half-eaten bowl of porridge complete with wooden spoon, communal rubbish bins, and a decorative necklace made with amber and glass beads are just a handful of the extraordinarily well-preserved remnants of a late Bronze Age hamlet unearthed in eastern England that’s been dubbed “Britain’s Pompeii” and a “time capsule” into village life almost 3,000 years ago.

The findings from the site, excavated in 2015 to 2016, are now the subject of two reports, complete with previously unseen photos, published this week by University of Cambridge archaeologists, who said they cast light onto the “cosy domesticity” of ancient settlement life.

“It might be the best prehistoric settlement that we’ve found in Britain,” Mark Knight, the excavation director and a co-author of the reports, said in an interviewThursday. “We took the roofs off and inside was pretty much the contents,” he said. “It’s so comprehensive and so coherent.”

The reason for the rare preservation: disaster.

The settlement, thought to have originally consisted of several large roundhouses made of wood and constructed on stilts above a slow-moving river, was engulfed by a fire less than a year after being built.

During the blaze, the buildings and much of their contents collapsed into a muddy river below that “cushioned the scorched remains where they fell,” the university said of the findings. This combination of charring from the fire and waterlogging led to “exceptional preservation,” the researchers found.

“Because of the nature of the settlement, that it was burned down and its abandonment unplanned, everything was captured,” Knight added.

“As we excavated it, there was that feeling that we were picking over someone else’s tragedy,” he said of the eerie site in the swampy fenland of East Anglia. “I don’t think we could smell the fire but the amount of ash around us — it felt close.”

Researchers said they eventually unearthed four large wooden roundhouses and an entranceway structure, but the original settlement was probably “twice as big.”

The site at Must Farm dates to about 850 B.C., eight centuries before Romans came to Britain. Archaeologists have been shocked at “just how clear the picture is” of late Bronze Age life based on the level of detail uncovered, Knight said.

The findings also showed that the communities lived “a way of life that was more sophisticated than we could have imagined,” Duncan Wilson, head of Historic England, the public body responsible for preserving England’s historic environment, said in a statement.

The findings unearthed include a stack of spears, possibly for hunting or defense; a decorative necklace “with beads from as far away as Denmark and Iran”; clothes of fine flax linen; and a female adult skull rendered smooth, “perhaps a memento of a lost loved one,” the research found.

The inhabitants’ diet was also rich and varied, including boar, pike and bream, along with wheat and barley.

A pottery bowl with the finger marks of its maker in the clay was also unearthed, researchers said, still containing its final meal — “a wheat-grain porridge mixed with animal fats” — with a wooden spatula resting inside the bowl.

“It appears the occupants saved their meat juices to use as toppings for porridge,” project archaeologist Chris Wakefield said in the university’s news release. “Chemical analyses of the bowls and jars showed traces of honey along with ruminant meats such as deer, suggesting these ingredients were combined to create a form of prehistoric honey-glazed venison,” he added.

Skulls of dogs — probably kept as pets and to help with hunting — were also uncovered, and the dogs’ fossilized feces showed they fed on scraps from their owners’ meals, the research found.

The buildings, some connected by walkways, may have had up to 60 people living there all together, Knight said, along with animals.

Although no intact sets of human remains were found at the site, indicating that the inhabitants probably fled the fire safely, several sheep bones were found burned indoors. “Skeletal remains showed the lambs were three to six months old, suggesting the settlement was destroyed sometime in late summer or early autumn,” according to the university’s news release.

Ceramic and wooden vessels including tiny cups, bowls and large storage jars were also found. Some pots were even designed to nest, stacked inside one another, Knight said — evidence of an interest in aesthetics as well as practicality.

A lot of similar items were found replicated in each home, Knight added, painting the picture of completely independent homesteads for each family unit rather than distinct buildings for shared tasks — much like we live today.

Household inventories often included metal tools, loom weights, sickles for crop harvesting, axes and even handheld razors for cutting hair.

The roundhouses — one of which had almost 50 square meters (nearly 540 square feet) of floor space — had hearths and insulated straw and clay roofs. Some featured activity zones for cooking, sleeping and working akin to modern-day rooms.

The Must Farm settlement has produced the largest collection of everyday Bronze Age artifacts ever discovered in the United Kingdom, according to Historic England, which partly funded the 1.1 million pound ($1.4 million) excavation project.

The public body labeled the site a “time capsule,” including almost 200 wooden artifacts, over 150 fiber and textile items, 128 pottery vessels and more than 90 pieces of metalwork. Some items will go on display at the nearby Peterborough Museum next month.

Archaeologists never found a “smoking gun” cause for the fire, Knight said. Instead, they suspect it was either an attack from “outside forces,” which may explain why the inhabitants never returned to collect their possessions from the debris, or an accidental blaze that spread rapidly across the tightly nestled homes.

“Probably all that was left was the people and what they were wearing; everything else was left behind,” Knight said of the fire.

But the preservation has left a window for people to look back through in the future. “You could almost see and smell their world,” he said.

“The only thing that was missing was the inhabitants,” Knight added. “And yet … I think they were there — you certainly got glimpses.”