Days and Nights on Hunter's Fen - John Humphreys

Desolate, remote, yet full of the echoes of history, the East Anglian fens are an ideal habitat for today's wildfowler, wanderer and fisherman. They have a strange and wild history, for savage Vikings, monks, Romans, adventurers, dour Dutch drainers and a creeping race of mongrel Britons have all, in their time, navigated the slow, meandering rivers. Later, the fenman was to wrest a precarious living from eels, fish, wildfowl and reed and peat cutting; from duck decoys, coprolite mines and herding bullocks, keeping at bay as best he could the ague and clouds of poisonous mosquitoes.;The underlying theme was water, the ever-present risk of floods, dykes, drains, washes, leams and cuts of his half-tamed waterland. The fenman and his hostile terrain with its strange birds and beasts are inextricably linked. This is the story of the gunners and fishermen, of wild, bloodshot sunsets, waving reeds, of old yarns, floods, otters, puntgunners, hen harriers and the author's life spent among them with rod, gun and flat-bottomed boat. Out on the lonely fen, waiting under a harvest moon for the mallard, the ghosts of the skaters, wild "slodgers", holy men and drainers, not to mention the awesome, spectral hound Black Shuck, rustle and whisper in the reeds, and echoes of wildfowl rise from an ancient mere with the sound of distant thunder.