A day out with Dave and Bertha

Northants reserves officer Ian Hilbert swaps counties and joins Dave Metcalfe at the Great Fen - and gets to meet and work with Bertha . . . all hands to the pump

As a reserves officer in Northamptonshire I work in a variety of different habitats; wetlands, ancient woodlands, limestone grasslands – some are rural reserves and others urban, but recently I had the opportunity to work on the Great Fen for a day, with Dave Metcalfe, Great Fen reserves officer, and Bertha (above).

Apart from the habitat, the expanse of the Great Fen is unlike anything that I usually work on: pretty much every unit of measurement is on a different scale – from the time frame of the Great Fen (100 years) to the sheer size of the place (100s if not 1000s of hectares). It’s a project that is converting/restoring what was once intensively farmed arable land, transitioning it back to grassland (to remove nutrients) and ultimately re-wetting the land to (re)create a wetland, emulating the native fenland, so reducing the carbon emissions released by the oxidisation of peat caused by current farming methods.

As part of the Wildlife Trust's management of the Great Fen water is pumped into ditches around some of the grasslands. Up until Thursday I’d never seen a pump – much less used one, this is where Bertha comes in – she's a large diesel powered pump, capable of shifting tonnes of water every hour, once she’s set up in position that is.

Dave is the team expert on Bertha and I'm sure can do most things on his own, however, to get Bertha to the required location we had to drive along the top of the Black Ham drain. The area of the Great Fen has been drained for agriculture well over 100 years ago and the peaty soils have dried out and oxidised and/or been blown away. The effect is that the land has shrunk and the main drains and old rivers are now above the surrounding fields. So driving along the drain bank means that there is a drop one side into the water, and on the other side into the fields. All this whilst feeling (and being) literally miles from anywhere - not an area in which you’d want to be stranded.

Dave towed Bertha to the site using a tractor and I followed closely in a Land Rover, sticking to his wheel tracks as the vegetation really doesn’t allow much of a view of the ‘track’. Once on the bank you can see for miles, the Fen is flat and any elevation really opens up the landscape. Sparing you a blow-by-blow account of setting up the pump and the preparation that precedes it, we started at 7.30am from the office base at Corney’s barn and eventually got it going at 3.15pm.

Part of the time was taken up with the difficulty of linking together the large pipes that connect to take the water from the pump to the ditches - here's the linking clasp that we just couldn’t get closed. I forget what the technical name or term is, but I do remember some choice names that we used for it . . . In the end Dave suggested that we ‘pop back’ to Corneys to get a lever to use: a one way journey of five miles – yes, the Great Fen is on a scale unlike any other BCN reserve. As well as learning more about pumps than I ever thought possible, I gained a small insight into the practical work that Dave and colleague Nicky Hennessy have to do on the Fen – they certainly have their work cut out.