The inland sea

Cambridgeshire, as every schoolboy knows, has no coast, is low-lying and doesn't have much to brag about in the way of rainfall. Yet it is criss-crossed with rivers, streams and drainage ditches so that water is never far away. There are plenty of sluices where it rushes through, deafening and throwing up a miasma of vapour rich with smells of siltiness, slimeyness and rotting vegetation. The water is greeny, browny grey. When there is no sun, it becomes almost black, forbidding. It must be very cold. A good place to get an idea of what I'm talking about is Sutton Gault, a hamlet down Bury Lane, a side road off the straight, undulating and terrifyingly fast B1381 from Earith to Sutton. Earith is the starting point for two gouges cut in the countryside and running north east that chute water off the land and divert, via sluices, some of the bulging, lazy flow of the Great Ouse. The gouges, so wide as to be navigable, rejoice in the names of the Old Bedford River and the New Bed River, also known as the Hundred Foot Drain. The land between is the Hundred Foot Washes, and is it this area that floods, creating an inland sea, half a mile wide in places and many, many miles long. At Sutton Gault I've seen the water so high that cars can't get across the washes. There is little foot bridge to the side of the road and 6ft above it, and I've walked across it with water lapping up through the planking and sloshing about. Small waves whipped by the wind. Next to the footbridge are a row of pollarded willows. Knarled specimens fed by all that water, they act as a filter, stopping any driftwood floating along on the inland sea from going further. A couple of miles along the bank from Sutton Gault is Mepal where the pub, The Three Pickerels, is worth a visit. Pickerels are a sort of pike, I'm told. It makes a nice circular walk, and you can stop to pick teasel and examine thistle heads and wonder what happens to the cows at pasture in the washes when the waters come.