12 April 2024
I was keen to visit the lowest land point in Great Britain at Holme Fen – it’s an amazing nine feet (2.75m) below sea level even though it’s getting on for forty miles from the nearest coast.
Holme Fen is a National Nature Reserve, site of the biggest silver birch woodland in lowland England and home to a wide variety of dragonflies, butterflies and amphibians as well as plants including the Fen violet and the Fen woodrush found almost nowhere else in the UK and at least five hundred types of fungi. It also contains about five hectares of rare acid grassland and a hectare of remnant raised bog, the most south easterly raised bog in UK.
We parked the car and spent a few hours wandering along the network of paths through the fen.
We discovered that there is an ambitious habitat restoration project underway, aiming to create a 3,700 hectare wetland, connecting Holme Fen NNR with other nature reserves with conservation benefits for wildlife. Other benefits include reduced flood risk due to natural water storage in the soil and reduction of peat loss to help to mitigate climate change.
In the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the fens of Eastern England were drained to create peat-rich farmland and 99% of the wild fen was destroyed. However drainage and farming of the land has contributed to a rapid decline of peat and means that current farming practices are not sustainable.
Holme Fen itself was still considered too wet to put under the plough. As the land dried out, it turned from reeds to raised bog then to a woodland with predominance of birch.
In 1848 near the time when Whittlesea Mere was drained, a local landowner William Well was concerned about the effects of the drainage. He commissioned the first Holme Fen Posts. The posts were driven through the soft, waterlogged peat into an underlying layer of clay and used to measure the rate the peat contracted. Thirty years after the post was sunk, the land had already dropped by eight feet. The ground level shown for 1848 is over four metres above current ground level.
The loss of fenland has been described as “the greatest single ecological catastrophe that ever occurred in England”. In many ways the great fen project will result in a man-made artificial reconstruction of a lost wilderness, but hopefully it will achieve its aims and result in a winning situation for all including both wildlife conservation and long term for climate change and the planet.
Where's Kathryn? 
I had to look Holme Fen up on the map, fascinating history. Did you know about the crashed Spitfire from WW2?
These pages are full of Munroists, Wainwright completers and other peak baggers but how many of us have visited the lowest point in the UK. Well done for highlighting it, or should that be lowlighting?
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Thank you. Yes there is a memorial to the pilot, Harold Penketh, and an information board explaining it was intended to be a routine training flight but during a battle climb manoeuvre to 28,000 feet his plane entered an uncontrolled dive. It isn’t known why he was unable to escape the plane and deploy his parachute. Excavation to recover the remaining wreckage along with some of the pilot’s personal items including his watch and cigarette case was carried out in October 2015. Some of his skeleton hadn’t been recovered in 1940 and was also found and interred in the churchyard where his ashes had been scattered at the time. The site is near the corner of a field on the edge of the woodland and it’s part of the wetland that is undergoing restoration.
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Thanks for that,
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