In May 2023 I gave a presentation at the Royal Photographic Society Contemporary SIG conference, held over a weekend at Foxton, Cambridgeshire. The theme of the event centred on the vulnerability of the Fenland area — its exposure to rising sea levels, the pressures on its flood infrastructure, and the broader implications of climate change for a landscape that sits, in large part, below sea level. Fens Photography by Peter Corr A Landscape Below Sea Level With a third of the

Fenland Landscape Photography Monochrome

I was recently contacted by a book publisher looking for a suitable image for the front cover of a new title. He was searching for something dark and mysterious to represent the Fenlands — and had come across my photography project completed during the lockdown period. 'Cambridgeshire Fenlands' Photography by: Peter Corr The Fenland Photography Project Followers of this blog may recall the project I completed during lockdown: a series of black and white photographs of the Cam

'Fenland' — A Photography Book 'Fenland' is a photography book documenting the Cambridgeshire Fenland landscape — a body of work made over several years, with the majority of the photographs taken during the winter of 2020/21. The book brings together black and white images of the Fenland's characteristic topography: dykes and rivers, tilted telegraph poles, uneven roads disappearing into the distance, and the isolated farmhouses and farm buildings that punctuate the flat ter

The Cambridgeshire Fenlands — Winter 2020/21 The winter of 2020/21 was, for many people, a period of enforced stillness — the lockdowns of the pandemic restricting movement and closing the usual routes of social and professional life. For me, it became an opportunity to engage more deeply with the landscape immediately around me: the Cambridgeshire Fenlands, which I had been photographing for some years but which I now had the time and the necessity to explore more systematic

Two Houses on Ten Mile Bank Fenlands Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 Diane Arbus Don’t worry, I’m not claiming to have...

Submerged — River Great Ouse at Earith Submerged agricultural land is a recurring feature of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands at this time of year, but the scale and incongruity of scenes like this one never cease to arrest the eye. This image was made near the village of Earith and records the impact of controlled flooding from the River Great Ouse — a managed process by which excess water is directed onto low-lying fields to protect settlements and infrastructure downstream. The

Living Behind an Embankment — Ten Mile Bank Road Ten Mile Bank Road runs along the top of one of the Fenland's great embankments — a raised causeway that carries the road above the level of the surrounding fields and the river. To live behind such an embankment is to inhabit a particular kind of landscape: one in which the horizon is defined not by the natural topography but by a man-made structure, and in which the relationship between the land and the water is held in a con

Ely Cathedral from the River Great Ouse Bram Stoker was inspired by Whitby Abbey to write the story of Count Dracula. Had he visited Ely...

Abandoned Farmhouse at Curf Fen Drove, Chatteris The abandoned farmhouse at Curf Fen Drove is one of many such buildings scattered across the Cambridgeshire Fenlands — structures that were once the centres of working farms, now empty and slowly returning to the landscape. The process of abandonment is gradual: first the windows go, then the roof, then the walls begin to subside into the soft peat beneath. The building becomes, over time, a ruin, and then a mound, and then not

The House at Southery Southery is a village in the Norfolk Fens, situated on slightly higher ground above the surrounding fields. The house in this photograph is typical of the vernacular architecture of the region: brick-built, functional, and set in a landscape that offers little shelter from the wind and the weather. It is a building that has been shaped by its environment — by the flatness of the terrain, the exposure of the site, and the particular quality of the Fenland

This is an archetypal Fenland landscape, just near Gold Hill, close to the Old Bedford River. There are no physical hills in the Fenlands...

The Fenland landscape belongs to Winter. In football terms, Summer relegates the Fenlands to the third division or possibly a non-league...

Ely Cathedral — A Gothic Presence in the Fenland Landscape Ely Cathedral is one of the great buildings of England — a Gothic structure of extraordinary scale and ambition, set in a landscape that seems almost too flat and open to contain it. The Cathedral was built on an island of slightly higher ground in what was, before the draining of the Fens, a vast expanse of water and marsh. It was, in a very literal sense, a building that rose from the water, and this origin is still

At first sight, this looks like a mirror image, but it is a photograph of one of the arrow-straight tree lines seen across the Fenlands....

In the Fenland landscape, the telegraph pole is the dominant vertical. There are no hills, no church spires visible from a distance, no trees tall enough to punctuate the horizon with any authority. The telegraph pole does all of this work alone — a slender, utilitarian object that becomes, in the context of the flat open landscape, something close to monumental. I have photographed and painted telegraph poles many times. They appear in the Fenland series repeatedly, not as s

Surreal Vision in the Cambridgeshire Fenlands The Cambridgeshire Fenlands have a quality that is, at certain times and in certain conditions, genuinely surreal. The flatness of the terrain, the enormous sky, the way the horizon seems to recede as you approach it — these are qualities that resist the ordinary categories of landscape description and that invite a different kind of looking. The Fens are not picturesque; they are strange. Surrealism and Landscape The Surrealists

Ely Cathedral in Winter Fog — The Ship of the Fens Ely Cathedral is known as the Ship of the Fens — a name that captures both its scale and its relationship to the flat landscape that surrounds it. Seen from a distance across the fields, it appears to float above the horizon, its towers rising from the mist like the superstructure of a vessel at sea. The analogy is not merely poetic: the Cathedral was built on an island of slightly higher ground in what was, before the draini

The St. JA, Purveyors of Fine W They say that Dublin is the City of Literature and I have to agree. It may not be W.B, Yeats or Seamus...

Breckland or the Brecks is a wild landscape of dark forests, open heathlands, sandy soils and iconic belts of pine trees that straddle...