Isleham, a village in the Fens

Opinions differ with visitors to the Fens. There are those who find the landscape compelling, while others make remarks about going mad in this landscape, and compare it to those Swiss valleys where the sun never shines. I can see both points of view, but I find some of the landscape quite compelling

 

If you like your nature uncurated, unbeautified, the stark, raw verges, the opposite of pretty, have their own charm:

 

This visit to the Fens was based around Isleham (pronounced “eyes-lam”), noted for a former priory building.

 

The priory wasn’t open (unsurprisingly), and seems to play the role of car park to the village, but the church was open, as well as the village pub. Here there was a couple of musicians doing cover versions of pop classics to a crowded garden full of drinkers. So there was some life in the village.

 After visiting the church, we did a circular walk alongside fields, with the church tower in view all the time (which didn’t prevent getting lost by misreading the map).

What can you say about Isleham? For the most part, it resembled so many other Fen villages. A small, busy Co-op, no other shops, no real central focus to the village. More than most Fen villages, it looks quite cut-off from the rest of the world. The roads to it, like so many roads in the Fens, are full of potholes, as if you are being reminded as you approach that nobody expects to be going anywhere else once they have arrived. I couldn’t imagine any kind of employment in the village apart from farms, which today require almost no casual labour. Yet there were many new houses in the village, for the most part ignoring any local building traditions, yet here and there a few of them with garden walls attached to remnants of much earlier walls of clunch, as if the new build had almost (but not quite) obliterated the medieval origins.

But the present-day isolation is nothing compared with earlier years, it seems. Mary Coe, aged 86, recalled that in the 1970s “No one left the village [of Isleham], and there were no outsiders in the village either .. if there was a stranger about, you wanted to know who they were, and where they come from.” This quote is from the excellent Imperial Mud: the Fight for the Fens, by James Boyce, 2020. Isleham cannot always have been like this. In the church was a major surprise:  some fascinating, vivid brasses, and a magnificent, brightly-coloured pair of Renaissance tombs:  

 

They are monuments to members of the Peyton family; the one above is Robert Peyton, died 1590. The Peytons also paid to put in a dramatic clerestory to the nave of the church, and an angel roof. At the time the Peytons lived, the Fens were not drained, so the village must have been an island, with communication to the outside world largely by boat. There in the priory was a handful of monks (no more than four); street names such as “the Causeway” suggest the aquatic nature of the place. The combination of grand tombs, a priory turned reused as a barn, and the rows of stark trees, create a strange, rather eerie effect.