Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #fenland
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THREAD. Artificial watercourses across the Cambridgeshire #fenland are called ‘lodes’ locally - from the Old English (ge)lād (derived from the verb ‘to lead’) - because they lead water from one place to another. Why was that necessary? The #landscape holds the clues.. 
2. Lodes are the largest in an interconnected hierarchy of man-made watercourses - the other two in that list are catchwaters and ditches. We’ll start with lodes, move on to catchwaters, and then to ditches - and suddenly the whole landscape makes sense (at least, to me)
3. Here’s the example of Wicken Lode to illustrate the principles. It runs from the edge of the dry ground (coloured orange, in the top R of the map) to the river Cam on the L. It is fed....
