W RLD
TIME travel does not come easily but last weekend I got a taste of what our Bronze Age ancestors experienced.
At Flag Fen just east of Peterborough I saw a 3,500-year-old wooden causeway which led locals over the watery landscape. There are five rows of posts jutting out of the peat, protected by a barn and kept moist to stop them turning to dust.
Outside, you can see and hear the wildlife the ancient families would have lived alongside.
Chattering overhead were swallows, while swifts screamed past as they sliced through the sky.
Flitting through the treetops were goldfinches with their windchime song and from the reedbeds came the perfectly paced rattle of reed warblers.
My wife and I circled a small lake surrounded by reeds whose whispering in the breeze was broken by the squawks of moorhens.
In the ditches, an emperor dragonfly laid her eggs near a tubbier relative, a broad-bodied chaser.
Our distant Bronze Age ancestors may not have had TV or central heating and may have shared their thatched round-houses with cattle and sheep, but they would have seen and heard all this wildlife. The birds and the bees provide a link stretching back across millennia.
Spotting them would have been more than just a leisure pursuit then. The arrival of the swallows would have heralded spring and their departure warned of winter.
Flag Fen is just a tiny fragment of the 1,350 square miles of silvery wetlands that once stretched across eastern England.
More than 99 per cent of these ancient fens have disappeared. But a mile to the south the Great Fen project is trying to turn back time.
Backed by Prince Charles, it is restoring 14 square miles of fenland between Peterborough and Huntingdon.
The Great Fen will fight flooding by soaking up the heavier rainfall expected from climate change, provide miles of paths for walkers, cyclists and horse-riders and help the wildlife our ancestors knew reclaim their kingdom.
If otters and bitterns, cranes and water voles, fen violets and swallowtail butterflies could come back in force, the world would be a better place. And we would not have to work so hard to see the world through our ancestors’ eyes. VIOLETS are blue, says the nursery rhyme, and so is Britain’s most threatened butterfly. The distribution of the High Brown Fritillary has plunged 96 per cent in recent decades. One reason may be a shortage of violets – the plant its caterpillars eat, says Butterfly Conservation. NEXT time you see a dragonfly be grateful you did not live 325 million years ago.
Early dragonflies could be 1ft long with a 27.5in wingspan, says a beautiful new book, Dragonflies & Damselflies: A Natural History by Dennis Paulson. But the swamp frogs that ate them were massive too.