Holiday Brochures and Tourist Information for Cambridgeshire
Sorry, none of our brochures match your search criteria.
Cambridgeshire
Most of Cambridgeshire s 1,300 square miles are covered by the Fens - a rich and fertile agricultural landscape divided up by drainage ditches. Once it was all a big swamp inhabited by duck hunters, eel fishermen and a few farmers scratching a living on patches of higher ground. This isolated region was the ideal refuge for outlaws and for the last Anglo Saxon freedom fighter, Hereward the Wake who defied the Normans from his redoubt on the Isle of Ely, which in those days really was surrounded by water. Later the Normans built a magnificent cathedral at Ely, which seems to rise out of the flat, empty landscape like a great ship.
Fenland is the setting for Waterland the novel by Graham Swift, with a film version starring Jeremy Irons. Today most of the Fens have been drained but at Wicken Fen, one of Englands earliest nature reserves, a chunk of the original waterlogged landscape has been preserved. By the middle of the 21st Century, most of Fenland may end up under water again, as a consequence of Global warming.