Submerged — River Great Ouse at Earith

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 Fenland and Water

The relationship between the Fenland landscape and water is fundamental and unresolved. The land here was reclaimed from the sea and the marsh over centuries of engineering effort, and it remains in a state of constant negotiation with the water that surrounds and underlies it. Much of the Fenland sits below sea level, held in place by an elaborate system of dykes, drains, and pumping stations. When that system is deliberately or inadvertently overwhelmed, the landscape reverts — briefly, partially — to something closer to its original state.

The four trees in this photograph stand in water that has covered the fields around them. Their bare winter forms are reflected in the still surface below, and the fence line that would ordinarily mark the boundary of a field disappears into the flood. It is a scene that is simultaneously familiar and strange — the ordinary geometry of the agricultural landscape made suddenly ambiguous by the presence of water where there should be land.

Photography and the Fenland

The Fenlands have been a sustained subject in both my photography and my painting. The black and white treatment used here reinforces the structural qualities of the scene — the vertical forms of the trees, the horizontal of the water's surface, the pale sky above — and removes the distraction of colour, which in the Fens can draw attention away from the underlying geometry of the landscape. The result is an image that is as much about form and interval as it is about the specific event it records.