VERY FLAT, CAMBRIDGESHIRE

Ross Clark, continuing our series on

England, describes a county no one loves, but where everyone seems contented

MOST English landscapes have been doc- tored by the hand of man, but none is as artificial as Cambridgeshire. It is a great sponge wrung dry by centuries of digging and pumping; a land created by one of the world's first capitalist adventures begun 2,000 years ago and unmatched until the building of the trunk railway lines of the 19th century.

Were it not for the dykes — called lodes in this part of the world — and the end- lessly whirring pumps, you would not be able to walk upon Cambridgeshire. It would be a 40-mile-long bog, punctuated only by the odd 'island' standing proud above the peat, connected by stony cause- ways fouled by the tides.

To modern folk, including the police who can still go a whole year without a murder to investigate, Cambridgeshire is tame, benign and unlikely to surprise. But it was not always so. When the Romans civilised Britain they made only tentative inroads into the fens, instituting a ferry service from Hunstanton to Lincolnshire rather than risk crossing the bottomless silts. The draining was hazardous, com- pleted piecemeal, fen by fen, and in some cases took two or three attempts to suc- ceed.

The great wealth of Cambridge colleges owes something to the draining of the fens. The names of the farms give away their investors — Trinity Farm, Caius Farm, Queen's Farm. Royalty and the mercantile classes joined the enterprise: the fens were the shopping centres and office developments of the pre-industrial age.

Small wonder, then, that Cam- bridgeshire is a serious-minded place. Nobody loves the county, but 'every sprawling village effuses contentment and economic well-being. Science parks, research institutes and landscaped com- puter factories: Cambridgeshire embraces everything that advanced industrial economies are supposed to. There are no `Not for me, thanks. I'm trying to give up peace.' smoke-stacks, no rustic backwaters; just high technology and a sense of purpose. Undergraduate life is nothing more than a small oasis of frivolity.

Appropriately enough, Cambridgeshire is a county on the march. Once confined to the hinterland of Cambridge and the black fen, it was one of the chief beneficiaries of Peter Walker's local government reorgani- sation of 1974. It has struck out westwards, swallowing poor Huntingdonshire, and north-westwards, stopping only when it had gobbled the gardens of Burleigh House in Stamford. Politically, Cambridgeshire now resembles a dumb-bell, the mass of Cam- bridge in the south-east balanced by that of Peterborough in the north-west.

The two cities are not on speaking terms. Cambridge is snooty and cerebral; Peter- borough common and hard-working. Cam- bridge wins Nobel prizes; Peterborough wins company relocations. Cambridge can afford proudly to repel tourists from its inner sanctums; Peterborough vulgarly advertises in the national press — it even has a slogan, 'the Peterborough effect', to describe how your business will take off once moved to the city's land-grabbing industrial estates.

Cambridgeshire has no proper country- side save for a chalky fringe in the extreme south, entirely alien to the genuine fenlan- der. Here there be hills. The Gog Magogs stand only 150 feet above the surrounding plain, but they are a treasure locally, not least to members of Cambridge Universi- ty's fell-running club. Lesser mounds are dispensable, in Cambridgeshire's busi- nesslike mind: the ridge at Barrington, the last before the North Sea, is gradually being chopped away for a quarry, the chalk beneath raked and drained to imitate the rest of the county.

The fens are no place for animals; sheep, cows and horses have no role on 1,000-acre arable farms. But the chalky fringe, as in all respects, is different. Sud- denly, five miles south of Cambridge the land opens up into classic hunting country. Louts from the East End come here for illegal hare-coursing. But there is a local squirearchy, too. Undergraduates and well-to-do farmers still run with the bea- gles around Duxford and the Wrattings though their patron saint, 'Squire' Kim Tickell, who ran the gothic, Wagner-rever- berating Tickell Arms at Whittlesford, has been dead four years now. Cambridgeshire lays claim to half of Newmarket heath, too, though not to the town itself, which lies in the jollier fields of Suffolk. The horses thundering down Row- ley Mile, out of the Cambridgeshire mist, career into Suffolk just beyond the finish- ing line. There, one feels, they are at home.

The fens, and thus provincial England, begin sharply after Cambridge. Four miles from the city centre the ground begins to steam like dung: the peat has begun. It is well-drained these days, but what the Pumps can never do is to raise the fens above sea level. Quite the reverse; the land has sunk as the water has been drawn off. Walls lean, foundations are exposed; near Wisbech there is a pole driven into the soil by the Victorians which stands 12-foot taller than it did. No one around here likes to talk about North Sea tidal surges.

Ely is always on the horizon in these parts, its cathedral standing stark like a stranded battleship which forgot to sail out on the last ebb tide. No English county ought to have more than one city, but Cambridgeshire now has three; Ely would be best left as the Cinderella of these but there is no chance of that now. The plan- ners saw stars before their eyes when they realised it had only 6,000 inhabitants. Now It has to have more, primarily because Hertfordshire is full up. Agrochemical and pharmaceutical concerns have moved in to soak up the labour. The bypass has been drawn wide of the city to allow for more cottage-style homes and their handkerchief gardens. There is even a train service to Manchester.

The fenfolk between Ely and the North Sea are an isolated people. It is rumoured that they are incestuous — a scurrilous Charge and probably untrue in an age wt hen bus travel is available cheaply to all eenagers. But fenfolk have an unsophisti- cated air to them none the less.

Untouched by tourism and weekenders, they are strangely unworldly. Earning a living can be an uncomplicated business: until you reach the ring roads of Peterbor- ough the potato is the mainstay of the economy. It is not unusual to see huge piles of turnips by the roadside, too; ani- mal fodder awaiting collection. Planting and harvesting these mean crops, once the work of gypsies, is now carried out by brightly painted, diesel-driven machines which whine up and down the arrow- straight roads depositing hard, muddy droppings on the tarmac. The power of these machines sends shivers into Cam- bridgeshire's muck-scented air. Jethro Tull would have had a field day.

It is better in the mist, this landscape, than on clear days when you can see the square hulks of articulated lorries four miles away. The most significant topo- graphical feature of Cambridgeshire is a drain, the 'Hundred-foot drain'. A hun- dred foot is its width; it stretches 25 miles in a dead straight line from Downham Market to near St Ives. It is not healthy country: the vapours used to ruin peasants' lungs. They are gone now, but when the wind blows it is better to be somewhere else; even February can bring dust storms in this, the driest of English counties.

Space is Cambridgeshire's asset. Yet if you want forests and sylvan meadows you won't find them here. Nor will you find chocolate-box cottages; thatch has long given way to corrugated iron as the chief roofing material. Occasionally you might see a tree or a thorny hedge which will grab you if you dare to walk too close. There is little except sky to please the artistic mind; Cambridgeshire's land, like its business, is cold and scientific.

Yet somewhere in this bleak, unlovely part of England lies a square mile of readi- ly exportable quaintness. Dons sipping sherry in Trinity Great Court and foppish undergraduates punting along the dammed River Cam know not or care little about the vast mud pan which surrounds them. American tourists gazing through the rose- tinted windows of the motor coaches never reach the fens.

Few appreciate it, but Cambridge's gen- teel trimmings were added only when Vic- toria was Empress of India. Before that the ancient university was monastic in spirit, as cold and sharp as a fenland frost, and kept God-fearing by frequent outbreaks of the plague; rats and fleas loved the bogs. In those days Cambridge was at one with its shire; now it seems out of place, like Dis- neyland rising from the French cornfields.

Only one Cambridge man has ever cared for Cambridgeshire: Rupert Brooke, who declare it 'the shire for men who under- stand'. But even he never wandered further than the soft grasses of Grantchester Meadows.