A Windmill Tour of the Cambridgeshire Fens
Drive north out of Cambridge and the land falls away into something almost featureless: a wide, flat plain of dark peat fields, drains running straight to the horizon, and church towers standing in for hills. This is the Fens, and for centuries the skyline here belonged not to grinding mills but to drainage mills — windmills built for one job only, lifting water off the land so people could farm it. Most of them are gone now, replaced long ago by steam, then diesel, then electricity, but their memory is stitched into every ditch, sluice and place name across Cambridgeshire.
A landscape made by water and peat
The Fens cover a large basin of eastern England, spreading across Cambridgeshire and into neighbouring Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Suffolk. Before it was drained, this was a vast wetland of shallow meres, reed beds and waterlogged peat, fed by slow rivers such as the Great Ouse and the Nene that struggled to reach the sea. Communities here lived on scattered islands of slightly higher ground, fishing, wildfowling and cutting peat for fuel, in a landscape that flooded every winter. It was rich but unpredictable ground, and turning it into reliable farmland meant solving a single problem: getting the water off the fields and keeping it off.
Vermuyden and the great drainage schemes
The large-scale draining of the Fens began in earnest in the seventeenth century, driven by wealthy landowners under the Earl of Bedford, who financed schemes to reclaim the southern Fens around the Bedford Level. The engineer most associated with this work was Cornelius Vermuyden, brought over from the Netherlands, where drainage and land reclamation were already well understood. Under his direction, new straight channels were cut across the fen, including the Old Bedford River and later the New Bedford River, designed to carry floodwater from the Ouse quickly out to the Wash. These works reshaped the region's hydrology, but cutting new rivers alone was not enough to keep the lower fields dry, especially once the reclaimed land began to sink.
The scheme was controversial from the start. Local fen dwellers, who had built a living out of fishing, fowling and reed-cutting in the wetlands, resisted the drainage works and the loss of common land that came with them, sometimes sabotaging the new banks and sluices. Dutch and Flemish workers were brought in for their expertise, and a number settled permanently in the reclaimed districts, leaving a lasting trace in local surnames and building styles. The Bedford Level itself was eventually divided into administrative districts, each responsible for maintaining its own stretch of bank, drain and pumping mill, a pattern of local drainage boards that, in modified form, still manages the Fens today.
How a drainage mill worked
This is where the windmill came in. A Fen drainage mill was not built to grind corn but to lift water, usually from a low fen field or a shallow drain up into a raised, embanked river or main drain that carried the water away. Inside, the sails turned a shaft connected to gearing that drove either a scoop wheel, a large paddle wheel that threw water upward with each turn, or later an Archimedean screw, a spiral pump that carried water up a sloping tube. Many of these mills were compact hollow-post or smock mills, sturdy timber structures with a cap that could be turned into the wind, built cheaply and in large numbers because a single mill could only manage a modest area of low-lying fen. Farmers and drainage commissioners often needed a whole chain of mills working along a stretch of waterway to keep a district dry.
Fen millwrights adapted their designs to a landscape with almost no natural rise or fall, which meant a mill's foundations, its scoop wheel and the level of the drain it fed into all had to be set with real precision, since even a small miscalculation could leave a mill unable to lift water high enough in a wet winter. Many mills were modest, single-family or single-farm structures rather than grand landmarks, built and maintained by the same fen communities that depended on them, and repaired or rebuilt in timber whenever storms or old age took their toll.
The problem of sinking land
Draining the Fens created an unusual and self-defeating effect. Peat is largely made of waterlogged organic matter, and once it is drained and exposed to air, it oxidises, dries out and shrinks. As the fen dried, the ground surface itself began to drop, in places by a considerable margin over the following two centuries, so that fields that had once been level with nearby rivers now sat well below them. The most striking evidence of this survives at Holme Fen, where a cast-iron post was driven down to the underlying clay in the nineteenth century to measure how far the peat surface would fall around it; today a visible length of that post stands exposed above the ground, a stark record of subsidence. For the windmills, this meant an endless struggle: as the land sank lower, water had to be lifted higher, and a single mill working alone became less and less able to do the job.
From wind to steam, then diesel and electricity
By the nineteenth century, steam power began to replace the windmill as the workhorse of Fen drainage. Steam-driven pumping engines, housed in solid brick engine houses, could lift far greater volumes of water far more reliably than sails ever could, and they were not at the mercy of calm weather or storms. One of the best-preserved examples is the Stretham Old Engine near Ely, a steam scoop-wheel pumping station that operated for well over a century before being retired and preserved as a working museum. Nearby, the Prickwillow Museum houses the diesel engines that took over fen drainage in the twentieth century, illustrating the whole progression from wind, to steam, to diesel and eventually to the electric pumping stations that manage the Fens today. Windmills, one by one, fell silent, were dismantled for materials, or simply collapsed and were never rebuilt.
Wicken Fen's surviving wind pump
A handful of Fen drainage mills still stand, and the most celebrated is at Wicken Fen, one of Britain's oldest nature reserves, cared for by the National Trust since the end of the nineteenth century. Its wind pump, moved to the reserve and restored, is one of only a very small number of such structures remaining anywhere in the Fens, and it still turns and lifts water on open days, giving visitors a rare working impression of how these mills once operated across the whole basin. Standing beside it, with the reserve's uncut reed and sedge stretching out in a rare surviving patch of true fen, it is easy to imagine dozens of similar mills once dotting the horizon, each one quietly keeping a small parcel of farmland just dry enough to work.
Explore on the map
Wicken Fen's wind pump, the Stretham Old Engine, the Prickwillow Museum and other Fen drainage landmarks can all be located and explored through our interactive map, alongside windmills and mills from across the rest of the world. Use it to plan a route through the flat Fen country, or simply to see how this small corner of Cambridgeshire fits into the wider story of wind and water.