Living Behind an Embankment — Ten Mile Bank Road

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 constant, precarious balance.

The Embankment as Subject

The embankments of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands are among the most distinctive features of the landscape — massive earthworks that have been built and maintained over centuries to hold back the water and protect the reclaimed land. They are, in a sense, the defining infrastructure of the Fens: without them, the landscape would not exist in its current form.

As a subject for photography and painting, the embankments offer a particular kind of visual interest: the way they define the horizon, the way they create a sense of enclosure in an otherwise open landscape, the way they carry the evidence of their own construction and maintenance. They are functional objects that have acquired, over time, a quality of presence that goes beyond their function.