My name is Izzy, and I am so happy to have joined the Museum of Cambridge as a PhD student, co-supervised by King’s College London. The project is titled ‘Weathering Climate Change: using museum collections to represent local experiences of climate change.’ I will be working with the Museum of Cambridge’s collection to explore the loss of weather-heritage, such as practices like fen skating, and how experiences of weather can be a way to understand climate change, which sometimes seems hard to fathom on a global scale. I started the PhD six months ago, and so far, it’s involved getting to know the museum’s huge collection, getting trained up by wonderful Collections Officer Beau – and lots (lots!) of reading.
Before the PhD, I did an undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and an MSc in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford. I always loved everything to do with museums and volunteered at the Holburne Museum in Bath. There, I assisted with the collections move, got stuck in with lots of learning and outreach workshops, and helped put on the Holburne’s first Pride festival, which was an amazing experience.
During my master’s, I became entangled with my other great love – peatlands. In the Pitt Rivers Museum collection, I came across a glass bead bracelet which had been found in a bog in Ireland. My mum is from Longford in the midlands of Ireland. Longford was, and is, bog country. I quickly became fascinated by all things to do with peatlands and carried out my master’s research with the Abbeyleix Bog Project, a peatland restoration group in County Laois. I used walking, drawing, and ethnographic interviews as methods to understand different people’s sensory knowing in peatlands. Since then, I’ve done lots of work with the youth-led peatland justice collective RE-PEAT on peatland restoration, heritage, and outreach. This includes a project called Books ‘n’ Bogs, where we work with Laois libraries to collect local stories, memories and experiences of peatlands.
So, for me, this PhD project is the perfect combination of heritage, wetlands, museum collections and research. The Fens are a beautiful, vast, flat landscape, home to many humans, wildfowl, mosses, frogs, mists, and myths. It has been a pleasure reading Enid Porter’s evocative accounts of Fen life. For example, in 1961 she drew on the records of W. H. Barrett, a man born just north of Littleport in 1891, to describe changing ways of life in the Fens:
‘(Barrett) saw the last of the true Fenland way of life before mechanisation, modern drainage methods and improved transport had largely destroyed it. Through his own family and through the old fenmen whom he knew in his youth, he is a link with the days when many of the fen people, in lonely cottages at the end of trackways which were ankle deep in black dust in summer and up to a horse’s belly in mud in winter, lived almost completely isolated from the outside… Only when Spring arrived or when severe winters froze the dykes and drains into roads easily traversed on skates, could many of them leave their peat fires and mingle with their fellows’ (1961: 584-585)
Much can be learned from this richly drawn picture. First, Porter highlights how the shifting seasons radically impacted people’s mobilities and level of connectedness. The Fens provided a different kind of infrastructural network than we are used to today, as frozen drains became roads in the harsh winters and ice skates seen as the mode of transport of choice. Second, Porter’s description is highly atmospheric, not only in the sense that it creates a particular mood but also meteorologically. ‘Black dust,’ ‘up to a horse’s belly of mud,’ and the smoke of the ‘peat fires’ are different combinations of peat, water, and air, shifting in form throughout the year. Finally, Porter raises the question of authenticity – what is the ‘true Fenland way of life’? What might that look like today?
Humans have lived in and around the Fens for thousands of years – as sea levels rose and fell through the early Holocene era, the Bronze Age, Roman settlement, the medieval period, up to the present day, humans engaged with the landscape in different ways and intervened on different scales. Drainage of the Fens from the early 1600s radically transformed the Fens from a peat and clay-rich wetland to arable farmland that is currently home to 50% of England’s grade 1 agricultural land, providing jobs, food and livelihoods to many people. At the same time, when peat dries out, it shrinks, losing its unique ability to store both water and carbon – sphagnum moss, one of the building blocks of peatlands, can hold up to 20 times its weight in water. Peat stores carbon because it is formed of layers of pickled plant matter, built up over thousands of years. Because the plants that constitute peat don’t fully decompose, they store carbon rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. When drained, that carbon dioxide is then set free. As sea levels continue to drastically rise due to anthropogenic climate change, the Fens are at risk of increased flooding, drought, and storms, not helped by peat shrinkage.
Enid Porter’s description of fen life points to questions I am interested in answering through this project. Namely, how do people live with the Fens as a dynamic, ever-changing, atmospheric landscape? And what do we carry with us, or lose, as we look towards the future? These are complicated questions. Throughout the PhD, I hope to speak to lots of different people about what life in the Fens means to them in order to understand what weather-heritage might be. Hopefully, these stories will enrich the Museum’s fenland collection and contribute diverse contemporary perspectives to the Museum’s existing oral histories, weather diaries, fen skates, eel griggs and mole traps.
I hope to see some of you around the Museum, and if so, say hi! I’m always happy to chat about all things peatlands, Fens, museum and weather related – as well as everything between and beyond.