The drained marshlands of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Eel catchers, wildfowlers, and the stewards of a landscape that would revert to wetland without constant human maintenance.
The Fens are the most engineered landscape in England. Without constant pumping, drainage, and maintenance, this land - some of it below sea level - would revert to the marshland it was before the Dutch engineers arrived in the 17th century. The people who maintain this landscape are stewards in the most literal sense: without their daily intervention, it ceases to exist as farmland.
The Archive documents the fen stewards whose skills keep this landscape functional - the pump operators, the dyke maintainers, the eel catchers whose traditional methods are being displaced by modern aquaculture. The eel catcher in particular represents a convergence of endangered skill and endangered species: the European eel population has collapsed by 95% since the 1970s, and the traditional catching methods are disappearing alongside the eels themselves.
The eel catchers of the Fens - the last practitioners of a trade that sustained the wetland communities for a thousand years.