The Fens and their drains

The Fenland environment is an engineered one and the engineering is the environment.

THE FIELDS ARE BELOW THE CHANNELS. Draining the peat caused it to shrink and oxidise, and the land surface fell — in places well below sea level. The drains, embanked to carry water across the sinking landscape, now sit above the fields they drain. Standing on a bank looking down at farmland on one side and water on the other is the ordinary Fenland experience and it is a good deal odder than it first appears.

WHICH MEANS EVERY LEVEL IS PUMPED. Water is lifted from low drains into higher ones and eventually out through tidal sluices to the Wash. Levels in a given channel are set for flood defence and agriculture, not for anything else, and they change on operational schedules rather than with the weather.

THE CHANNELS ARE UNIFORM. Straight, of consistent width and depth, with reed margins and soft silt beds, running for miles without a bend. There is no riffle, no gravel run, no natural pool.

SO THE FEATURES THAT EXIST ARE ARTIFICIAL AND ARE THEREFORE PREDICTABLE. Bridges, sluices, pumping station outfalls, bends where a channel does turn, junctions between drains, moored boats, and changes in reed density. Those are the structure, and fish use them for the same reasons fish use structure anywhere.

THE WASHES ARE THE EXCEPTION. Land deliberately flooded to store water becomes, seasonally, an enormous shallow water body with entirely different ecology from the channels around it.

AND THE SEAWARD END IS TIDAL, with sluices separating fresh from salt and providing the only reliable current in the system.

The Fens' species list has changed substantially within living memory and the change is the interesting part.

BREAM AND ROACH BUILT THE REGION'S NAME. Fenland drains supported enormous shoals of bream and roach through the middle of the twentieth century, and the match fishing that developed here was built on them. Catches from that era are part of British angling folklore.

THOSE FISHERIES DECLINED, and the causes are argued about: water quality, changed management, cormorant predation, the arrival of new predators, and habitat simplification all feature in the argument. What is not in doubt is that the drains do not fish as they did.

ZANDER ARRIVED AND CHANGED THE SYSTEM. Introduced to the Great Ouse system in the 1960s and spreading through the connected drains, zander became established across much of the Fens. They are a non-native predator, they are subject to specific rules in some waters, and they are also now the region's best-known sport fishery — which is an uncomfortable combination and is stated as such rather than resolved.

PIKE are native, abundant and the other major predator target, and Fenland pike fishing has a serious following.

PERCH, TENCH, RUDD AND CARP are all present, with carp increasingly significant in the drains as well as in the region's still waters.

EELS were historically enormously important here — the Fens are named in association with them and the town of Ely takes its name from them — and the European eel is now critically endangered.

AND THE DRAINS HOLD SPECIES A READER MIGHT NOT EXPECT: burbot were once present in eastern England and are gone, and the Fens are one of the places their loss is documented.

Fenland disciplines were shaped by a problem: how do you locate fish in miles of identical water?

THE ANSWER MATCH ANGLERS DEVELOPED WAS TO BRING THE FISH TO YOU. Feeding accurately and consistently at a fixed spot, and holding a shoal there, matters more here than on water where you can read where fish will be. That emphasis is a large part of why Fenland match fishing developed the feeding disciplines it did.

POLE FISHING SUITS THE CHANNELS EXACTLY. A uniform depth at a fixed distance, no current to speak of, and the need for precise repeated bait placement is the situation the pole was designed for, and Fenland anglers did a great deal to develop its use.

FEEDER AND WAGGLER FISHING cover the wider channels at range, and the choice between them is a wind question as often as a fish one — these are exposed, windy waters with no shelter.

PREDATOR FISHING IS THE MODERN SPECIALITY. Lure fishing for zander and pike, deadbaiting, and increasingly small-boat, float-tube and kayak approaches that let anglers cover the miles of bank that walking cannot. Zander in particular are a low-light fish and the fishing is organised around dawn, dusk and coloured water.

MOBILITY BEATS PATIENCE FOR PREDATORS. Where a match angler holds one spot, a predator angler covers ground — working the artificial features, the junctions and the sluices in sequence rather than waiting.

AND EVERYTHING IS AFFECTED BY THE PUMPS. A drain being drawn down or filled fishes differently, and the operational schedule is a variable no angler controls and few outsiders know exists.

The Fenland fishing year has the usual seasonal drivers plus one nobody else has.

SPRING brings warming water, spawning activity, and the statutory river close season where it applies — and whether it applies to a given drain is a specific legal question worth resolving before fishing rather than after.

SUMMER IS WEED SEASON, and weed growth in nutrient-rich still channels can be dense enough to make some drains close to unfishable. Weed cutting by the drainage authorities is itself a scheduled operation that transforms a water overnight.

AUTUMN IS THE PREDATOR SEASON and is when the Fens are at their best. Water cools, weed dies back, zander and pike feed hard, and the channels become navigable to a bait again.

WINTER IS THE CLASSIC FENLAND FISHING and it is brutal. Flat, exposed country with nothing between the angler and the wind, short days, and often the best predator fishing of the year. It is also when the safety picture is worst: cold water, steep banks, remote drains and few people about.

THE PUMPING SCHEDULE IS A SEASON OF ITS OWN. Levels are managed differently through the year for flood defence and irrigation, and a drain's level, flow and clarity may change for operational reasons that have nothing to do with weather. Anglers who fish these waters regularly learn the patterns; visitors are frequently baffled by them.

AND FLOOD EVENTS FILL THE WASHES, turning flood-storage land into enormous temporary shallow water bodies and moving fish around the system in ways that reshape a fishery for a season.

Permission in the Fens is complicated because the water is owned and managed by more bodies than anywhere comparable.

A ROD LICENCE IS REQUIRED, issued by the national fisheries authority for England. It is a licence to fish, not permission to fish anywhere.

PERMISSION COMES FROM WHOEVER CONTROLS THE WATER, and in the Fens that may be an internal drainage board, an angling club, a consortium of clubs, a navigation authority or a private landowner — and it varies drain by drain and sometimes bank by bank. There is no general answer and the specific answer is worth establishing before travelling.

THE INTERNAL DRAINAGE BOARDS ARE THE BODIES WITH REAL POWER over these waters. They operate the pumps and sluices, they have statutory functions in water level management, and their operations take priority over recreation. A drain is a piece of flood defence infrastructure that happens to hold fish.

THE CLOSE SEASON QUESTION IS A REAL ONE. England retains a statutory close season for coarse fish on rivers, and whether a given Fenland channel is legally a river, a canal or a still water for that purpose determines whether it applies. The answer is specific to the water, it is published by the fisheries authority, and getting it wrong is an offence rather than an embarrassment.

NON-NATIVE SPECIES RULES APPLY TO ZANDER in some waters, and what an angler may or must do with a captured zander differs between waters within the same system.

NAVIGATION AUTHORITIES control the larger channels.

AND FISHINGHQ STATES NONE OF IT. What it states is that five separate bodies may have a say, which is the fact that decides where to ask.

Fenland vocabulary is drainage-engineering vocabulary that anglers adopted, and it describes real things.

A DRAIN is an artificial channel cut to move water off the land. The word carries no implication of size: some Fenland drains are larger than most English rivers and are the principal fishery of their district. Calling one a river is a category error a local will notice.

A LEVEL is a drainage district and the system of channels serving it. The Middle Level and the Bedford Levels are the best known. It is an administrative and engineering unit, and it is why the region's geography reads as an organisational chart.

A WASH is land between embankments deliberately allowed to flood to store water at times of high flow. The Ouse Washes are the classic example, and seasonally they become one of the largest shallow water bodies in England.

A PUMPING STATION lifts water from a low channel into a higher one. Every water level in the Fens is downstream of one.

A SLUICE is a controllable gate between channels or out to tidal water. Sluices produce the only reliable current in an otherwise still system, and fish gather at them for that reason.

A LODE is an older term for a channel, frequently a very old one — several Fenland lodes are Roman in origin, which is a reminder that people were draining this landscape long before the seventeenth-century engineers.

AND ELY means 'eel island', which is the clearest surviving evidence of what this landscape was and what it produced before it was drained.

The Fens have the most dramatic history of any English fishing landscape, and it is a history of deliberate destruction followed by consequences.

BEFORE DRAINAGE THIS WAS A WETLAND, and one of the richest in Europe: meres, reedbeds, seasonal flood and an economy built on fish, eels and wildfowl. Eels were currency in the literal sense — rents were paid in them — and Ely's name records it. The people who lived here were called Fen Slodgers and their economy was a wetland economy.

DRAINAGE BEGAN IN EARNEST IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, driven by landowners and executed largely by Dutch engineers, cutting the straight channels that define the landscape today. It was contested violently at the time by the people whose living it destroyed.

AND IT PRODUCED AN UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE that is still unfolding. Drained peat shrinks and oxidises. The land fell — and continues to fall — so the drainage that made the land farmable created a permanent and increasing requirement to pump. Windmills gave way to steam, steam to diesel, diesel to electricity, each generation lifting water further than the last.

THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY FISHERY was a coarse-fishing phenomenon: enormous bream and roach shoals, celebrated match catches, and a bank culture that produced techniques still used nationally.

ZANDER ARRIVED IN THE 1960s and reshaped the ecology and the fishing.

AND THE FUTURE IS AN OPEN QUESTION. The peat continues to shrink, the pumping requirement continues to grow, and sea level is rising against the outfalls. Whether this landscape stays as it is, is partly rewetted, or changes some other way is being actively debated, and the fishing sits inside that question rather than beside it.

Fenland angling culture is one of the more distinct in England and it has had to change.

MATCH FISHING IS THE FOUNDATION. The drains supported open matches and team competitions on a scale and a seriousness that shaped British match angling nationally. The techniques, the feeding disciplines and much of the pole's development came from anglers solving Fenland problems.

IT IS A HARD-WEATHER CULTURE. This is flat, exposed, windy country with no shelter, and Fenland anglers fish it in winter as a matter of course. There is an unsentimental toughness about the local approach that visitors from sheltered rivers notice.

THE DECLINE OF THE BREAM AND ROACH FISHERIES WAS A CULTURAL LOSS as well as an ecological one. A region whose identity rested on enormous silver-fish catches had to find something else, and what it found was predators.

ZANDER SIT AWKWARDLY IN THAT CULTURE and the awkwardness is honest. They are a non-native species implicated in the decline of the fisheries the region was famous for, and they are also the reason anglers now travel here. Local opinion is genuinely divided, the rules differ between waters, and anybody fishing here should establish the position on the specific water rather than assume.

ACCESS IS LOCAL AND CLUB-BASED, and the pattern of who controls which bank is knowledge held by people rather than published.

AND THERE IS A GROWING BOAT AND FLOAT-TUBE CULTURE among predator anglers, which is a practical response to miles of bank and a limited number of access points rather than a fashion.