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Cottage, Burnt Fen, Prickwillow c.1890 (photo F L Harlock) (Cambridgeshire Collection)

Burnt Fen, Prickwillow

History of Burnt Fen

Houses in the fens were often very remote from each other. Rev. Claude Kingdon in Prickwillow in the fens, Home Mission Field, May 1893, wrote: Many of the wooden dwellings are mere hovels, and with them, as with the more substantially built ones, there is an almost entire absence of straight lines owing to the quaking ground on which thy are built, cracks being visible everywhere, and chimney pots so precariously crooked as to seriously threaten the inmates on gusty nights. These houses are terribly overcrowded, many of them having only two rooms and containing as many as a dozen occupants.

Riddling potatoes, Burnt Fen (MoCX/2000)

Celery planting, Burnt Fen, 1940s

See also, The Urgent Hour – a history of the drainage of the Burnt Fen District by John G A Beckett, 1974.

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