A water story

Wicken Fen National Nature Reserve currently covers 785 hectares and has a number of important designations: National Nature Reserve, and Site of Special Scientific Interest; a Special Area of Conservation and a Ramsar Site (an international wetland designation).

The straight, raised waterways that cross the area to the south of Wicken may be of Roman origin, used to transport goods to the River Cam and from there up to King's Lynn. The later medieval period saw some localised drainage at the fen edge that produced grazing land. In the seventeenth century the land was drained and transformed into intensively farmed countryside that continues today.

Yet the area known as Wicken Fen always remained undrained and was used for peat digging and sedge harvesting by local villagers. It became popular from the mid-nineteenth century with Victorian naturalists. A young Charles Darwin collected beetles here in the 1820s, while the fathers of modern ecology and conservation, Cambridge botanists Sir Harry Godwin and Dr. Arthur Tansley, would later carry out their pioneering work here. In the 1890s when the peat and sedge economies collapsed, Charles Rothschild, of the banking dynasty, and a passionate entomologist, purchased 2 acres of the Fen for £10 and donated them to the National Trust.

In 1999, the National Trust launched the “Wicken Fen Vision”, an ambitious 100-year, landscape-scale conservation project to extend the reserve from Wicken south towards the outskirts of Cambridge, covering an area of 5300 sq hectares. The aim is to create a mix of wetland habitats to include wet grasslands, reed beds, marsh, fen and shallow ponds and ditches, as well as establishing chalk grassland and woodlands. These new areas all help to protect the existing Wicken Fen National Nature Reserve, which is one of the most important in Europe.
As it is not possible to manage newer areas of the reserve in such an intensive manner as the ancient heart of the fen, the restoration has three key elements.

These are: natural regeneration of plants; reducing the loss of water through field drains and ditches, and the use of grazing animals. Grazing animals will help wetland and grassland plants to become established in new areas of the nature reserve.

The introduction of grazing herds of Highland cattle originating in Scotland, and Eastern European Konik ponies, are helping to create these new habitats. These are hardy breeds, capable of thriving on fenland all year round, plus they have a placid nature. Their impact on vegetation will vary, with some areas grazed more heavily than others. Their introduction to the reserve will also attract new species of flora and fauna to the fen, through their well trodden paths in areas of long grass, dusty hollows where they roll and their dung. When horses graze they eat selected plants leaving short, cropped grass. Cattle tear at vegetation and leave a rougher landscape. These grazing styles complement each other for the long term management of Wicken’s new areas of nature reserve.

www.wicken.org.uk