I’ve been intrigued for several years by the embankment that has been thrown up along the east side of the Twenty Pence Road, Cottenham, as it approaches the bridge over the Great Ouse. Signs on the top warn of deep excavations. I assumed mineral working was going on out of sight, something not uncommon in this part of Cambridgeshire. I have recently read Joseph Koudelka – A Visual Biography by Melissa Harris, which includes a description of his photography of the landscape blighted during the construction of the Channel Tunnel in the late 1980s (part of the Mission Photographique Transmanche). This set me to thinking that I should try to photograph this corner of the Fens as part of my long-term landscape project.
The site is known as Mitchell Hill Farm. Permission was given for the extraction of 1.7 million tonnes of sand and gravel over a site of some 72 acres in 2018. Subsequent consent has been granted for the deposit of circa one million cubic metres of suitable inert waste material there. This recovery operation will progressively restore the quarried site back to agricultural use as well as wet grassland for nature conservation.
I took Long Drove out of Cottenham to the site on the 21st April to get some insight into what is going on and to try to take some photographs. It looked a blighted and blasted landscape in a palette of black, grey and brown, a chaos of workings that appeared to have no logic to the outsider, the uninitiated. It was impossible to do any serious photography without getting access to site, but some pictures from Long Drove give an impression of what is going on behind that embankment, an alternative Fen landscape.
