In the seventeenth century, engineers drained the Fens of eastern England on a scale that is difficult to picture now. Ninety nine per cent of the original wild fen, a vast wetland stretching across Cambridgeshire and the surrounding counties, was converted into farmland within a couple of generations. What had been one of the richest wetland ecosystems in Europe became some of the most productive arable land in the country, and almost nobody alive today has ever seen what was lost to make that happen.
Two small fragments escaped. Woodwalton Fen was bought privately in 1910 and protected soon after. Holme Fen survived largely because the ground there was too wet to farm easily, though drainage of the land around it eventually dried even that out. Between them, these two isolated pockets of ancient fen are almost all that remains of a landscape that once covered the entire region.
The Great Fen project is trying to change what “almost all” means, on a timescale that most conservation projects never attempt to plan for.
A Plan Measured in a Century
What struck me most, reading into this, is the timeframe involved. The project describes itself as a hundred year plan, aiming to reconnect Woodwalton and Holme Fen by restoring the farmland between them back toward something closer to wetland, buffering and linking two isolated fragments that have sat apart from each other for the better part of four centuries.
A hundred years is longer than any of the people currently working on the project will be alive to see completed. That is an unusual thing to build an organisation around, and it says something about the scale of what draining the Fens actually did that undoing even a fraction of it is expected to take generations rather than years.
Why Wet Peat Matters So Much
The environmental case for rewetting rests on how differently peat behaves depending on how wet it is. Drained peatland, farmed conventionally, decomposes steadily and releases carbon as it does, something in the region of thirty nine tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per hectare every year on the most intensively farmed land. Rewetted fen cuts that to around six tonnes. Fen restored close to its natural state releases well under one tonne. The difference between farmed and wild, in carbon terms, is not a marginal improvement. It is close to two orders of magnitude.
Peatlands cover only about three per cent of the world’s land surface, yet they hold roughly a quarter of all the carbon stored in soil globally, which makes drained peat, wherever it exists, a genuinely significant and often overlooked source of emissions. Restoring the Fens is not simply about bringing back a lost wetland for its own sake, though that motivation clearly matters to the people doing the work. It is also, quietly, a meaningful piece of climate mitigation hiding inside what looks from a distance like a nature reserve expansion project.
Farming the Water Instead of Draining It
What I found genuinely unexpected is that this is not simply a story about taking farmland out of production and letting it revert to wilderness. Alongside the wetland restoration, the Great Fen has been developing something called paludiculture, essentially wet farming, growing crops that actually want a high water table rather than crops that need the land drained to survive.
The trials so far have tested bulrush and common reed for building materials, sphagnum moss as a genuine alternative to the peat currently extracted for use in garden compost, sweet manna grass as a food crop, and a scattering of more unusual plants being investigated for use in medicine and flavouring. In 2023 this moved beyond small trial plots into a 120 hectare farm scale demonstration, described as a UK first, growing typha bulrush and sphagnum at a scale intended to actually prove the economics rather than simply the ecology.
One detail from a related trial in Greater Manchester stayed with me longer than the rest. A typha crop grown on rewetted peatland there is being harvested for its seed heads, which a materials company then processes into a padding material used to fill winter jackets, a genuine textile application growing directly out of land that would otherwise have kept draining carbon into the atmosphere as conventional arable farmland. It is a strange, quietly satisfying thought, a coat lined with something grown on land that used to be wetland, farmed wet again instead of dry.
The Part That Isn’t Simple
None of this happens without real difficulty for the people whose land and livelihoods are tied up in it. Converting productive arable farmland to wetland, even gradually, even with support, asks a great deal of the farmers and landowners involved, and the project itself is candid that transition funding, covering the real costs those landowners face during the changeover, remains one of the central practical obstacles to expanding beyond the current demonstration sites.
Paludiculture is still, in commercial terms, an unproven industry. Nobody yet knows for certain whether bulrush insulation or sphagnum moss compost alternatives will find a market large enough to make wet farming a genuinely viable replacement income for a farmer used to growing wheat or vegetables on drained peat. The trials underway now are as much about answering that economic question as the ecological one.
What a Hundred Years Actually Buys
I keep returning to the timescale, because it changes how I read everything else about this project. A hundred years is long enough that failure at any single stage does not have to mean the whole plan fails, and short enough, relative to how long it took to drain the Fens in the first place, that undoing even part of that damage within a few human lifetimes starts to look genuinely possible rather than merely aspirational.
Nobody currently working on the Great Fen will see the finished version of what they are building, whatever that finished version eventually turns out to look like. That does not seem to have discouraged anyone involved. They are testing crops, negotiating funding, buying farmland one purchase at a time, and slowly, patiently, reintroducing water to ground that was taken from the water four hundred years ago. Whether the fen that eventually rejoins Woodwalton and Holme resembles what was lost, or becomes something new entirely, farmed wet rather than simply wild, is a question nobody currently has the answer to.
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