Race-the-sun write-up Part 4 - The Fens, again.

The Bedford Level: flat lands and the Flat Earth.

My first stop was The Causeway in Sutton, a village between Ely and Huntingdon. The Causeway – which really is a causeway - is a very minor road that crosses the Old and New Bedford rivers, two artificial waterways that run absolutely straight and parallel for miles across the Fens, helping to keep the area agricultural rather than aquatic. (Actually, there’s a third one, the River Delph, but it’s little more than a ditch and you’d be hard pressed to spot it amongst the reeds.) The land around here is famous for its pitch black, incredibly fertile soil. It’s a huge natural gro-bag. But here, this strip of land between the rivers is a rare bit of a wilderness, making a peaceful place for a breakfast stop.
I remember from my geography lessons with Mr Golden at Swaffham Sec. Mod.: only the outside bank of the Old and New Bedford Rivers is built up above the surrounding land like most Fenland waterways. The water is allowed to overflow into the strip of land between them in the winter; a long, thin flood plain, and not at all suitable for the intensive arable cropping of the surrounding acres.
I also remember “Esso” Golden explaining that a famous experiment was conducted on the Old Bedford River to prove the curvature of the Earth. Three posts, all exactly the same height, were set up on boats spread out along a six mile stretch of the river. Sighting along the posts, the middle one appeared to be higher than the other two, so the Earth is round. QED. I discovered a related oddity that old Esso didn’t explain when I checked all this with Professor Google to make I was remembering it right. There were two or three such experiments. On the first go, the sight line was too close to the surface and the mirage effect made it look as if the Earth was flat after all!
I never have figured out why they went to all the trouble of mucking about in boats with theodolites and so on when they could have done much the same thing from any old quay, watching a boat sail out and over the horizon. I guess that the belief in a flat earth was so well established that some explanation or other for ships disappearing over the horizon was generally accepted. I’m sure this and the Bedford Level experiments all say something profound about the nature of scientific knowledge, but I’ll leave that for another day.

The space between the Old and New Bedford Rivers is allowed to flood in Winter.
(Clever old Dutch engineers designed it that way.)
This causeway allows the people of Sutton and Sutton Gaunt to stay in touch.