Abandoned Farmhouse at Curf Fen Drove, Chatteris

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 nothing at all.

Ruins and the Fenland Landscape

Ruined and abandoned buildings are a recurring subject in my Fenland photography. They carry a particular quality of pathos — the evidence of lives lived and work done, now dissolved into the landscape — and they raise questions about the relationship between human habitation and the natural world. In the Fens, where the land itself is a human creation, maintained against the constant pressure of water, the abandoned farmhouse is a reminder of the fragility of that creation.

The black and white treatment that I use in my Fenland photography suits these subjects particularly well. Colour would introduce a quality of the picturesque that is at odds with the austerity of the subject; in monochrome, the structural relationships become clearer, and the building's relationship to the landscape — its isolation, its exposure, its gradual dissolution — is more directly apparent.