Both literally and culturally, the highpoint of the area is Ely Cathedral which can be seen for many miles around due to its elevated position (at an elevation of c 20 metres!) on the ‘Isle of Ely’, now surrounded by low lying land some of which is below sea level.
What did the Fenmen do?
How did Vermuyden fix the floods?
How did the fens get drained?
What is the sink of thirteen counties?
How many people died in the Fens?
What was the undrained fen?
How has water affected the world?
See 2 more
Is Ely above sea level?
The high ground forming the Isle, reaching some 86 feet (26 metres) above sea level, consists of Jurassic clays overlain in part (although not in this area) by Cretaceous Lower Greensand.
Will Ely flood?
The flood risk for the next 5 days is very low. Updated 10:30am on 18 October 2022 .
How far below sea level are the Fens?
The Fens are very low-lying compared with the chalk and limestone uplands that surround them – in most places no more than 10 metres (33 ft) above sea level.
Is Ely the smallest city in England?
Ely is England's second smallest city1, and the main market town in East Cambridgeshire with a population approaching 18,000. Nestled in the Fens approximately 15 miles north of Cambridge, it is famous for its magnificent Norman cathedral known locally as “The Ship of the Fens”.
Is Ely still an island?
The River Great Ouse was a significant means of transport until the Fens were drained and Ely ceased to be an island in the seventeenth century. The river is now a popular boating spot, and has a large marina. Although now surrounded by land, the city is still known as "The Isle of Ely".
Was Ely once an island?
The Isle of Ely is the highest point in these fenlands and was formerly an island surrounded by marshes and swamps; it could be reached only by boat or causeway. This inaccessible location became the scene of Hereward the Wake's resistance to William I the Conqueror about 1070.
What UK towns are below sea level?
Holme is situated within Huntingdonshire which is a non-metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire as well as being a historic county of England. The parish contains the lowest point in Great Britain, 2.75 metres (9.0 ft) below sea level.
Where is the lowest place in UK?
Holme FenThe lowest point in Great Britain is Holme Fen in Cambridgeshire, at nine foot below sea level, while the lowest settlements are Stowbridge, Prikwillow, Ten Mile Bank and Nordelp. 5. The furthest point from the sea is just east of Church Flatts Farm, Coton-in-the-Elms, Derbyshire.
What areas of UK are below sea level?
Indeed, England's lowest elevation actually sits below sea level by almost three metres. This spot exists at Holme Fen (map) in Cambridgeshire. Specifically it's farmland adjacent to a 266 hectare National Nature Reserve.
Is Ely a nice place to live?
This fenland town has a lot going for it – direct trains to Cambridge and London, indies aplenty and of course the cathedral. Rolling hills there are not, but the flat, water-logged countryside has a strange kind of beauty you'll come to love. Part of our Top 250 Places to Live series.
Why is Ely famous?
Ely is now dominated by the magnificent Norman Cathedral, a legacy left by William I. The invading Normans undoubtedly used their building skills to demonstrate their power over the local population. With its intricately carved stonework, Ely Cathedral took almost 300 years to complete.
What is the least populated town in the UK?
With just 1,600 residents, St Davids is Britain's smallest city by population, sitting on a beautiful stretch of the Pembrokeshire coast. It's home to pastel-painted cottages, pubs, galleries, an outdoor market, restaurants serving farm-to-fork and foraged food and — the jewel in its crown — a 12th-century cathedral.
Why is Ely an island?
The “Isle of Ely” is so called because it was only accessible by boat until the waterlogged Fens were drained in the 17th century. Still susceptible to flooding today, it was these watery surrounds that gave Ely its original name the 'Isle of Eels', a translation of the Anglo Saxon word 'Eilig'.
When was Ely an island?
Isle of Ely• Created1889• Abolished1965• Succeeded byCambridgeshire and Isle of ElyStatusAdministrative county (within Cambridgeshire)19 more rows
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What did the Fenmen do?
The Fenmen were a tough breed -- stubbornly independent of the aristocracy, known to keep to themselves and resent outsiders. They found a good living, made better by tax avoidance, by fishing, catching waterfowl, trapping eels, coppicing willows and other marsh trees, making baskets, taking peat for fuel, and harvesting sedge and reeds. The sedge and reed harvests were economically important as high-quality thatch for roofs and were ecologically important for maintaining the Fens’ open character and abundant wildlife. Peat harvest was important in the same way, and the peat beds were left to restore themselves. In all, the Fens probably pumped as much net value into the medieval economy as the same amount of farmland.
How did Vermuyden fix the floods?
Vermuyden understood that the flooding rivers clogged the Fens with deposits and set about fixing that by straightening their channels. A straightened river would rush its floodwaters right past the Fenlands, scour its channel and dump its sediment harmlessly into the Wash. In the largest of many projects, Vermuyden diverted the Great Ouse into two parallel channels running straight as a ruler -- an amazing flood control structure 20 miles long and 1 mile wide. When floods became too great for the two channels, the mile space between them would store the excess waters. At the end of their 20-mile run, the channels intersected and rejoined the Ouse at the start of tidal waters, where a sluice could hold them back at high tide and release them at low tide to scour the channel.
How did the fens get drained?
So the Fens were drained permanently, except when they were covered by disastrous floods. Typically, floods would come suddenly as a sluice or a bank failed during a major event, releasing a great surge of water onto downstream structures too weak to take it. The entire nonsystem could pancake in a few hours. When a failure of this sort occurred, church bells would ring to alert the folk of danger; the church itself, invariably on high ground, would serve as the evacuation shelter. After World War I, they tried to use air raid sirens, only to find the electricity failed before the sluices, and bells continued to ring out warnings as late as 1947.
What is the sink of thirteen counties?
Let’s start with these errors. Daniel Defoe called the Fens “the sink of thirteen counties,” meaning that rivers drained most of Middle England into these low, flat lands. In the spring, these rivers would run in high floods, heavy with sediment. When they hit the flat Fens, they would slow down and drop the heaviest of their sediment load. These sand and clay bars would obstruct the channels and send the rivers into wide meandering patterns, perhaps doubling their length before they hit the North Sea in the Wash, a large shallow bay. Of course, the longer a river took to fall to the sea, the slower its water, and the more sediment it dropped.
How many people died in the Fens?
Things finally got serious when, on January 31, 1953, a North Sea gale flooded drained lands from England to Holland, killing 307 people in the Fens and more than 2,000 in the Netherlands. While the English response was less dramatic (and less effective) than the Dutch, the Fens have now been comprehensively planned and bristle with big, new flood-control works. In the Fens, nature has at last been conquered.
What was the undrained fen?
Now it’s time to take on one last error: that the undrained Fens were empty wastelands of little or no economic use. This was certainly untrue by medieval times and was probably never true. Left alone, the Fens grow over with a dense, brushy scrub vegetation known locally as carr. It seems, however, that medieval Fenland vegetation consisted of vast beds of sedge and reed, with willow and grasslands in the drier spots and ponds in the wetter spots. These ecosystems are not natural; they are human-induced and must be harvested regularly to avoid the transition to carr. People were in the Fens from the start, exploiting the resources and shaping the environment.
How has water affected the world?
Nearly every continent has a low-lying stretch of coast that has been affected. The United States has several: Georgia’s Sea Islands, the Florida Everglades, Louisiana’s Mississippi Delta. In England, the largest such area is called the Fens, 300,000 acres of flat and sinking land, facing the North Sea from Cambridge to Lincoln.The Fens, like the Louisiana Delta, formed over the last 10 millennia as rivers dumped sediment onto a sinking plain, forming wide marshes. A person might see one of these marshes as something eternal and unchanging, but this appearance is erroneous; in geological terms, these lands are recent and changing rapidly. A person might also think he’s looking at ordinary land that’s been flooded. This, too, turns out to be a serious, common and costly error.
What Causes Below-Sea-Level Depressions?
Most major depressions are associated with tectonic plate boundaries. They form when converging plates deform or when spreading centers open. A few are volcanic in origin.
Why does Lake Assal evaporate?
This water evaporates rapidly because the climate there is one of the hottest and driest on Earth. This high evaporation rate makes Lake Assal the saltiest body of water on Earth.
How many square miles is the Earth below sea level?
It has an area of approximately 200,000 square kilometers or 77,000 square miles of land below sea level. The ten lowest areas on Earth are listed below. We also have a list of 33 countries where land below sea level occurs.
What is the deepest trench in the ocean floor?
The trench is huge, roughly the size of Mexico. The deepest point on the ocean floors is -10,916 meters in the Mariana Trench.
Why is the Earth below sea level?
Strictly speaking, most of the surface of the Earth is below sea level because oceans cover 71% of the planet. But sea level varies and during the Great Ice Age 18,000 years ago, sea level was 130 meters lower. Today, large areas are under water that during the Great Ice Age were well above sea level.
What is the lowest depression in the United States?
The Salton Trough is the second lowest depression in the United States. The lowest land in the Salton Trough is along the shoreline of the Salton Sea. The lake level is approximately 69 meters below sea level; however, the lake rises and falls in response to runoff from the New, Whitewater and Alamo Rivers plus some agricultural runoff. The bottom of the Salton Sea is about two meters higher than the bottom of Death Valley.
What is the lowest point in Africa?
2) Lake Assal (in the Afar Depression) Elevation: 155 meters below sea level (approximate and fluctuating) The shoreline of Lake Assal is the lowest point in Africa and the second lowest location on Earth.
How deep is the Bentley trench?
Deeper and larger than any of the trenches in the list above is the Bentley Subglacial Trench in Antarctica, at a depth of 2,540 m (8,330 ft). It is subglacial, covered permanently by the largest glacier in the world. Therefore, it is not included in any list on the page. If the ice melted it would be covered by sea.
What would happen if ice melted?
If the ice melted it would be covered by sea. The biggest dry land area below sea level that has been known to exist during the geological past, as measured by continuous volume of atmospheric air below sea level, was the dry bed of the Mediterranean Sea of the late Miocene period during the Messinian salinity crisis .
What are not included in the ebbing of sea tide?
Places artificially created such as tunnels, mines, basements, and dug holes, or places under water, or existing temporarily as a result of ebbing of sea tide etc., are not included. Places where seawater and rainwater is pumped away are included.
Background: historical flooding and drainage
The Fens are very low-lying compared with the chalk and limestone uplands that surround them – in most places no more than 10 metres (33 ft) above sea level. As a result of drainage and the subsequent shrinkage of the peat fens, many parts of the Fens now lie below mean sea level.
Formation and geography
At the end of the most recent glacial period, known in Britain as the Devensian, ten thousand years ago, Britain and continental Europe were joined by the ridge between Friesland and Norfolk.
History
There is evidence of human settlement near the Fens from the Mesolithic on. The evidence suggests that Mesolithic settlement in Cambridgeshire was particularly along the fen edges and on the low islands within the fens, to take advantage of the hunting and fishing opportunities of the wetlands.
Draining the Fens
Though some signs of Roman hydraulics survive, and there were also some medieval drainage works, land drainage was begun in earnest during the 1630s by the various investors who had contracts with King Charles I to do so. The leader of one of these syndicates was the Earl of Bedford, who employed Cornelius Vermuyden as engineer.
Modern farming and food manufacturing in the Fens
As of 2008, there are estimated to be 4,000 farms in the Fens involved in agriculture and horticulture, including arable, livestock, poultry, dairy, orchards, vegetables and ornamental plants and flowers. They employ about 27,000 people in full-time and seasonal jobs.
Restoration
In 2003, the Great Fen Project was initiated to return parts of the Fens to their original pre-agricultural state. The periodic flooding by the North Sea, which renewed the character of the Fenlands, was characterised conventionally by the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica as "ravaged by serious inundations of the sea".
Sports
The Fens is the origin of English bandy and speed skating. It is the base of Great Britain Bandy Association and in Littleport there is a project in place aiming at building an indoor stadium for ice sports. If successful it will have the largest sheet of ice in the country with both a bandy pitch and a speed skating oval.
Data sources
We use two data sources to find your height above sea level: Your device, and Open Postcode Elevation.
Your device
Many devices (and most smartphones) will - with your permission - report on your altitude, which is the same thing as your elevation or height above sea level in metres or feet.
Open Postcode Elevation
Open Postcode Elevation is an open dataset containing British postcodes and their elevations, in metres above sea level.
What are the two bedrocks in the fens?
In this area there are two ‘bedrocks’ at the surface. The oldest, underlying the lower land in this part of the fens, is Ampthill Clay, which is c.155 million years old ( Jurassic age). An extensive sea covered this part of Britain with the clay forming from material deposited on the sea floor. The Kimmeridge Clay is younger (also Jurassic) and lies on top of the Ampthill Clay forming a series of roughly east-west ridges. It is famous for the fossils of marine reptiles such as Plesiosaurs. The other surface ‘rocks’ are much younger, from the current ‘Ice Age’ (starting 2.6 million years ago). The oldest is Glacial Till left by retreating glaciers, and Glacial River Sands and Gravels which remain on the hill tops. These are both of Pleistocene age – deposited during the Totternhill Glaciation, 160,000 years ago when a tongue of ice extended south over the fens. In the Holocene (the last 11.7 thousand years, since the Devensian Glaciation ), the Ouse has deposited River Terrace Sands and Gravels, some remaining northeast of Witcham and in Mepal Fen, west of the Washes. A small patch of marine Shell Marl in Mepal Fen shows the sea once reached here (in the Neolithic ). Peat formed from decaying vegetation in freshwater ’swamps’, whilst Alluvium is fine, river material, that is still deposited when the river floods.
Where is the fen edge?
This part of the Fen Edge Trail links the two villages of Sutton and Haddenham, which lie in the south west of the Isle of Ely. The Isle is better thought of as an archipelago, since it includes such separate ‘isles’ as Littleport, Coveney and Wardy Hill. Prior to the major draining of the Fens in the 17th century, the Isle was surrounded by freshwater marshes and meres. This walk follows ancient droves and ways, alongside the Catchwater Drain, around the edge of the Isle linking these historic villages that sit on key promontories where, once, our ancestors sat and looked out across marshes or, sometimes, even sea. We start on the higher slopes of the Sutton ridge, on which the church stands, but drop rapidly down to the low fen, reaching just 2 metres above sea level. After skirting the drained ‘ bay ’ between Sutton and Haddenham, walking for some time along the 5m contour (the classic ‘fen edge’ ), we then climb once more onto a ‘ headland ’ and pass the highest point on the Isle, North Hill, with its stunning views in all directions. Descending from the hill, we walk a section of the ancient route between Earith in the west and Ely in the east by following Hill Row as it climbs to higher ground at the centre of the village of Haddenham, once a major crossroads in the Fens. The high ground that creates the Isle is formed by a series of ridges made from Jurassic and Cretaceous bedrock, including the famous Woburn Sands (better known from Bedfordshire), capped in places by glacial material and reaching a height of some 40 metres (133 feet) above sea level.
How old is Ampthill Clay?
The oldest, underlying the lower land in this part of the fens, is Ampthill Clay, which is c.155 million years old ( Jurassic age). An extensive sea covered this part of Britain with the clay forming from material deposited on the sea floor.
How many years ago was the Pleistocene?
Pleistocene (Glacial Till, Sands and Gravels, River Terrace Sands and Gravels): c. 625,000 to 11,700
Where is Kevan found?
Other significant discoveries have also been made in the area including ‘ Kevan, the Stretham pliosaur ‘. This important find was dug from the Kimmeridge Clay, a Jurassic rock famous for its fossils, that is seen at the surface in various parts of south east Cambridgeshire as well as at its more well-known outcrop on the Dorset coast. Some of the remains of ‘Kevan’ were preserved at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Science in Cambridge and one of the hind paddles, over 2m long, is still on display there.
What did the Fenmen do?
The Fenmen were a tough breed -- stubbornly independent of the aristocracy, known to keep to themselves and resent outsiders. They found a good living, made better by tax avoidance, by fishing, catching waterfowl, trapping eels, coppicing willows and other marsh trees, making baskets, taking peat for fuel, and harvesting sedge and reeds. The sedge and reed harvests were economically important as high-quality thatch for roofs and were ecologically important for maintaining the Fens’ open character and abundant wildlife. Peat harvest was important in the same way, and the peat beds were left to restore themselves. In all, the Fens probably pumped as much net value into the medieval economy as the same amount of farmland.
How did Vermuyden fix the floods?
Vermuyden understood that the flooding rivers clogged the Fens with deposits and set about fixing that by straightening their channels. A straightened river would rush its floodwaters right past the Fenlands, scour its channel and dump its sediment harmlessly into the Wash. In the largest of many projects, Vermuyden diverted the Great Ouse into two parallel channels running straight as a ruler -- an amazing flood control structure 20 miles long and 1 mile wide. When floods became too great for the two channels, the mile space between them would store the excess waters. At the end of their 20-mile run, the channels intersected and rejoined the Ouse at the start of tidal waters, where a sluice could hold them back at high tide and release them at low tide to scour the channel.
How did the fens get drained?
So the Fens were drained permanently, except when they were covered by disastrous floods. Typically, floods would come suddenly as a sluice or a bank failed during a major event, releasing a great surge of water onto downstream structures too weak to take it. The entire nonsystem could pancake in a few hours. When a failure of this sort occurred, church bells would ring to alert the folk of danger; the church itself, invariably on high ground, would serve as the evacuation shelter. After World War I, they tried to use air raid sirens, only to find the electricity failed before the sluices, and bells continued to ring out warnings as late as 1947.
What is the sink of thirteen counties?
Let’s start with these errors. Daniel Defoe called the Fens “the sink of thirteen counties,” meaning that rivers drained most of Middle England into these low, flat lands. In the spring, these rivers would run in high floods, heavy with sediment. When they hit the flat Fens, they would slow down and drop the heaviest of their sediment load. These sand and clay bars would obstruct the channels and send the rivers into wide meandering patterns, perhaps doubling their length before they hit the North Sea in the Wash, a large shallow bay. Of course, the longer a river took to fall to the sea, the slower its water, and the more sediment it dropped.
How many people died in the Fens?
Things finally got serious when, on January 31, 1953, a North Sea gale flooded drained lands from England to Holland, killing 307 people in the Fens and more than 2,000 in the Netherlands. While the English response was less dramatic (and less effective) than the Dutch, the Fens have now been comprehensively planned and bristle with big, new flood-control works. In the Fens, nature has at last been conquered.
What was the undrained fen?
Now it’s time to take on one last error: that the undrained Fens were empty wastelands of little or no economic use. This was certainly untrue by medieval times and was probably never true. Left alone, the Fens grow over with a dense, brushy scrub vegetation known locally as carr. It seems, however, that medieval Fenland vegetation consisted of vast beds of sedge and reed, with willow and grasslands in the drier spots and ponds in the wetter spots. These ecosystems are not natural; they are human-induced and must be harvested regularly to avoid the transition to carr. People were in the Fens from the start, exploiting the resources and shaping the environment.
How has water affected the world?
Nearly every continent has a low-lying stretch of coast that has been affected. The United States has several: Georgia’s Sea Islands, the Florida Everglades, Louisiana’s Mississippi Delta. In England, the largest such area is called the Fens, 300,000 acres of flat and sinking land, facing the North Sea from Cambridge to Lincoln.The Fens, like the Louisiana Delta, formed over the last 10 millennia as rivers dumped sediment onto a sinking plain, forming wide marshes. A person might see one of these marshes as something eternal and unchanging, but this appearance is erroneous; in geological terms, these lands are recent and changing rapidly. A person might also think he’s looking at ordinary land that’s been flooded. This, too, turns out to be a serious, common and costly error.
