Fen Landscape – Reach Lode

I fulfilled a long-held, though modest, ambition last weekend: to walk along Reach Lode going north-west from the village – previous walks there have always been south along the Devil’s Dyke.

Burwell Fen, Reach, April 2021

The village had the quiet of a sleepy Sixties Sunday when I arrived and parked along Fair Green.  Passing the front of the romantically overgrown Congregational Chapel, I and took Chapel Lane down to a track that led through trees to The Hythe and the west side of the Lode.  The embanked path overlooked pasture with sheep grazing, something rare to see, hear and smell in the Fens.  The landscape was dominated by a double row of pylons carrying skeins of cables from the major sub-station at Burwell.  Hedges and trees sheltered the path from a brisk and chilly northerly wind for the first few hundred metres.  Dried, bleached reeds swaying and rustling in the wind fringed the grey-green water of the Lode.  Soft calls and an occasional squawk betrayed hidden birds; a kestrel scanned the embankments; and a solitary reed bunting flitted from stem to stem along the water’s edge.

Reach Lode, Reach, April 2021

On either side of the Lode the landscape opened out into marshland with seasonal standing water and tufts of sedge.  Towering clouds, white, pearly and ashen, drifted against an azure background, sending waves of light and shade across the land.  A mile from the village a new humped- back bridge carried the Lodes Way over the water.  From the top Adventurers’ Fen and Wicken Fen stretched away to the north.  The anxious calls of gulls, ducks and geese floated in on the wind; roe deer and highland cattle went quietly about their business of conservation grazing.

Travellers’ Site, Burwell, Cambs, April 2021

I crossed the bridge and climbed two fences to get onto the path along the east side of the Lode.  In the distance, beyond a lagoon, blue in the reflected sky, a scar of sheds, vans and scrap vehicles was a jarring neighbour to the ecological re-wilding landscape. Two horses grazing nearby looked forlorn.  I passed under the humming power lines back to Reach.

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