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A LOVE LETTER FROM THE FUTURE

T H E  F E N  S E A

ALL CONTENT, IMAGES AND PHOTOGRAPHY ©2024 MARK AARON.

MUSIC ℗ & ©2024 MARK AARON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

 

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NOTES ON THE FEN SEA

Introduction

 

The Fen Sea is my personal sandbox of ideas. It is at times, a symphony, a play, a documentary film full of imagined characters and interviews. It is paintings, photographs, drawings and a novel, a talk, a poem, an art exhibition, a forgotten part of the East Anglian regional identity and an evolving conversation about a changing relationship between people, the land and the sea.

 

The Hole

I discovered The Fen Sea in a dry hole, while searching for a lost ancient village in a Suffolk field.

The year before he died, on Sunday mornings, I’d accompany my father on an archaeological dig and we’d kneel side by side, each with a square metre of exposed rich soil, digging carefully and delicately brushing away the earth lest we break something of note beneath our trowels. We’d mostly chew over details from the week only to be interrupted when one of us found something of interest, a shard of pottery, most likely fired clay known as 'St.Neot's-ware'. Sometimes we'd turn up a fashioned antler and sometimes, old bones. If an object appeared significant, we’d bag it, label it, and call over the expert to ask questions. The expert was Mel Birch, my fathers life long friend and neighbour who wrote the definitive book on Suffolks ancient places*.

 

Its worth explaining that the diet of the medieval poor included lots of oysters grown in ditches and we’d sometimes discover a layer of discarded oyster shells, which would often be the first indication that here was once was a settlement. So it was with some surprise, while digging a metre below the oyster layer, that I encountered another, more ancient strata of shells. Not just oysters though, but a mix of broken razor shells, clams and mussels.

 

I called out, “I think there’s an older settlement here, it’s been occupied more than once”.

 

Mel ambled over and peered curiously over my shoulder into the hole.

‘No Mark’, he paused and stretched upright with knowing authority, “what you have there my boy, is ‘The Great Fen Sea’".

The Storegga Wave

Our coastline has been eroding for centuries, Millennia in fact. At the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, meltwater from the Pennines carrying rich alluvial soil flooded the low lands from Hull to Cambridge and into Suffolk, laying down what is now the richest farmland in Europe. The North Sea was still frozen and the highest point of the island of Doggerland which once connected us to the continent sat above the ice. The meltwater from the diminishing Irish-English glacier backed up from The Wash and created a vast shallow sea across East Anglia.

​Around 8000 yrs ago, the shallow sea was added to, when a giant submarine earthquake and underwater land slip off the coast of Norway created a huge tsunami which sank Doggerland and flooded East Anglia further. An event known as The Storegga Wave.


Ocean archaeologists digging in what is now known as The Dogger Bank have uncovered the bones of Lions, Mammoth's, Woolly Rhinoceros, plus prehistoric tools and weapons from human habitation. We don't know where these peoples migrated too as the water levels rose.

To the west of submerged Doggerland, on the East Coast of Britain (which had now become an island off the coast of mainland Europe) the Fen Sea sat over part of what is now Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Over the subsequent millennia this shallow sea naturally started to drain, first becoming marshland and then a thriving wetland habitat. This was a wild place, a vast floodplain of swamps and reed beds, slow meandering rivers and damp forests, teeming with wildlife.

The Eel Men and Whittlesea Mere

Ensuing waves of human migration tried to tame this area. The Romans built elevated roads across it, successive kings tried to impose their will on it but the osmosis between land and sea became hard to define. The indigenous people, ‘the Eel Men’ that lived in the vast marshes were difficult to locate and therefore tax. Subsequently, these parts of East Anglia became a land of rebellion at odds with the Crown. Cromwell’s army was raised here. In the 17th century Dutch engineers (The Gentlemen Adventurers) employed by The King came to drain the land with their steam powered pumps in order to exploit the farmland. Without notice, communities were evicted, unique habitats destroyed, and ancient archaeological sites lost forever. Rebels, known as ‘the Fen Tigers’, rose up, building dams and ditches, burning fields, cutting fences, disrupting the efforts of power.

 

Rich towns grew up along its shores of this untamed area. Cathedrals and wool towns. The Isle of Ely really was an Island. Eventually the money won. The land was drained. Deeping Fen fell 6 metres once the water was removed. Holme Fen, 7 metres. The fine rich top soil, not bound with water, blew away in the wind carving away in places up to a further 4 metres. The landscape was destroyed in favour of farming. Even up until the 19th Century, Whittlesea Mere was the largest inland body of water in England below the Lake District. Paintings exist of Victorians skating over its frozen surface. The Norfolk and Suffolk Broads are the last remnants of this ancient sea.

 

These facts, this history, settled in me. As an artist, I started writing little stories and making sketches of this lost landscape. I tried to inhabit the minds of its people through successive waves of change and migration. Imagined micro windows into their loves and struggles against the elements, fate and state.

Waves. It was that word that resonated with me. An allegory for a dance between earth and water, how it could be mercurial, unclear, interesting, and the ebb and flow of people who live here, also mercurial, interesting. Us in fact.

Then, one day, I read about the Sermersuaq Glacier and I had an epiphany, where all these ideas coalesced and swam together.

 

Sermersuaq

Sermersuaq is the name the Inuits give to the vast Ice Sheet that covers almost the entirety of Greenland. 2,400 x 1,100 kilometres of fragile ice. In places the ice sheet extends to a depth of three and a half kilometres. It holds 8% of the Worlds freshwater. 2.9 million cubic kilometres of ice that reflects heat and light back into space.

Over 10 years ago, Google and NASA produced a version of Google Earth where you could input data based on global warming and, watch, depending on the concentration of atmospheric carbon, to the resulting rise in sea level.

If the Sermersuaq ice sheet collapses as predicted, the sea level in the Northern Hemisphere is estimated to rise by more than 7 metres heralding the return of The Fen Sea.

Taking all these facts into account my mind spun with creative possibilities and ways to articulate these ideas. I wrote little plays, scenarios of this imagined future and sketched out characters and how they would interact in this changing world. I considered economics, food, fishing, farming,  supply and demand, wildlife migration, politics and technology. I wondered how people might exist in this flooded land and considered a potential explosion of migrating birds and wildlife. I read the latest government paper on East Coast erosion which included a policy of ‘managed retreat’, allowing whole settlements to fall into the sea with little compensation. I thought what might happen to the Nuclear facilities at Sizewell on the Suffolk coast.


I researched how the sea had been shaping the eastern most counties for centuries; this dance between natural forces; about Dunwich, about the storm that barrelled down the North Sea in ‘53, funnelled into a rage where the sea narrowed, raising the water that became a surge and killing hundreds; about the Boxing Day tsunami in Banda Aceh, and years of flooding in Bangladesh and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. I read about how the shape of our North Sea beaches changes in winter. How Orford Ness, the sand bars at the mouth of The Deben and the stone ringed pools at Shingle Street, all change after a storm and about how governments abandon people and the land to their fate.

Notes in a glacier

A few years ago, I was in France on the border with Italy and Switzerland, high up on the Mont Blanc Massive at 16000ft. I was walking on a glacier and the French authorities had carved 100ft tunnels into the blue ice, a remnant of exploration now repurposed for the benefit of tourists. Deep inside the glacier I remember taking my glove off and running my fingers over the blue luminous tunnel of ice and marvelled at trapped air bubbles thousands of years old, pockets of archeological atmosphere.

Later, standing at the snout of the glacier, I listening to the wind circulating in the valley, coming off the high peaks of The Hellebron and the Augille du’Midi. Occasionally the glacier creaked and hummed with unseen stress. Shards of ice and rock would break off and go rattling down the scree, echoing off the sides of the steep carved valley. Constantly, there was a drip, drip, drip from the melting nose of ice, and in that rhythm, I heard the first notes of what would become The Fen Sea.

 

On Cambridge Beach

 

One of the movements from the symphony I have provisionally titled, ‘On Cambridge Beach’. Currently, there is no beach at Cambridge, but according to the Google-NASA map, there will be.

 

For me, The Fen Sea is part of our regional identity. It contains past and imagined future stories about our place here on the east coast, where the fingers of the sea via rivers, sluices, drainage and cuts are traced far inland. It’s about our relationship to our environment, about how we have been shaped by immigration both by wildlife, people and the sea. It’s an imagined future of solidarity and resistance, the liminal shifting boundaries of loss, memory and adapting to change. The parallels of how we leave marks, how ancient barrow mounds that still dot our landscape and are like standing waves, a palimpsest of time.

The Fen Sea is a love letter to us from the future. Even when subsumed, beneath the tides and the traps of the sea, the people and the land remember their shape.

Mark Aaron MA FRSA
10th October 2024
Suffolk. UK.

* Mel Birch's book 'Suffolk's Ancient Sites & Historic Places' documenting 6000 sites across Suffolk, parish by parish, available from Infinite Books on Amazon.https://www.amazon.co.uk/Suffolks-Ancient-Sites-Historic-Places/dp/094813450X

 

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Questions

 

In 50 years time, are the new Fen Tigers the climate protesters? the disenfranchised evacuees who have left their homes and memories and sense of place behind. Maybe people will adapt, overcome, living on vast floating farms in brackish marshland cultivating reeds and samphire for the finest restaurants in submerged vanished places that still bear their names. I've been holding these thoughts in my mind when sitting at the piano, sketching out melodies.


Mark Aaron MA FRSA

1st December 2024

Suffolk. UK.

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A Teaser

 

Sometimes, and I think this applies to all art forms, one the of the hardest elements to composing is to exercise restraint and not try to charm your listener by throwing every trick at them in the first few bars. There is an element of trust that your audience will be sufficiently beguiled and not distracted, especially in a world where everything seems to fight for out attention.

 

A few days ago, I submitted a musical teaser to the Suffolk Writers group and I have been bowled over and inspired by the written responses. It's opened my mind up to the idea of collaboration with local artists in any art form who might be inspired by the whole concept.

 

Mark Aaron MA FRSA

7th December 2024

Suffolk. UK.

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Creative Futurology 


I have wondered if there'd be any appetite for running a writers/artists workshop to imagine what the future of a flooded landscape might be. A collection of creative futurologists.


Mark Aaron MA FRSA

8th December 2024

Suffolk. UK.

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