Willingham Feast 2014
If you are looking for something to occupy your time over the next couple of weeks in the Ouse Washes area, you probably need look no further than the Willingham Feast 
2014.
Full programme of Events
With everything from a Feast Market to a Ceilidh and from a live music night to an exhibition in commemoration of World War I, there will be something for all interests.
The full programme of events is on the Willingham Life website, with a copy of the schedule below.
Fancy an active but charitable weekend out in the Ouse Washes?
Join The Ouse Washes Experience on the 21st September 2014 and raise money for the emergency medical charity Magpas amongst other local charities.
Welney Nature Reserve
Walk, Run or Cycle. It’s your experience, it’s up to you!
The Headline Charity: Magpas
Founded in 1971 Magpas is a unique charity which offers support to the ambulance service. The charity heavily relies on public donations to provide the Magpas Helimedix Air Ambulance and rapid response cars. The Magpas Specialist Medical Teams attend to cases of life threatening illness and major trauma throughout the East of England. Operating 18 hours a day the teams are staffed by highly trained Pre-Hospital Doctors and EEAST Paramedics who volunteer their own time to work with the charity.
Get Involved- all are welcome!
OWE Poster. Source: The Rotary Club of Ely-Hereward Website
The Ouse Washes Experience is organised by The Ely-Hereward Rotary Club in cooperation with the OWLP Scheme, WWT, RSPB, Environment Agency and Cambridgeshire County Council. It is a sponsored event with 3 routes of varied lengths running adjacent to the Old Bedford River between Welney and Welches Dam. For cyclist there is an extended route.
It is a great opportunity to get out and enjoy the unique and beautiful landscape of the Ouse Washes. Come and enjoy the wildlife and many other attractions the area has to offer, take in the fresh air, keep fit as well as raise money for charity through your sponsorship.
The Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership Team will be there to provide information on the OWLP Scheme as well as participating. So take the opportunity to learn about projects going on within the area.
Whether you are a keen walker, runner or cyclist, or if you just want to get out and about… join in! Whether you are participating individually, as a family or as part of a group come and experience the Ouse Washes!
For further information or to register for your own Ouse Washes Experience please visit The Rotary Club of Ely-Hereward website.
Following on from a previous post giving an overview of the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership’s 25 projects which the OWLP partnership aims to deliver between now and 2017, we can now also proudly present our Landscape Conservation Action Plan!
The Landscape Conservation Plan (or LCAP) is the Ouse Washes LP partnership’s main document that was sent to the Heritage Lottery Fund, together with other paperwork for our stage 2 grant submission, back in November 2013; in short, it contains:
Download the LCAP here
The full Landscape Conservation Action Plan can be downloaded here (or from our Resources section):
The whole process of the LCAP could be summarised as such:
Happy reading!
Related posts and pages:
I recently gave a couple of presentations, which made me think that we are due an update of a presentation about the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership scheme for this blog.
So, please find in our Resources section a new PowerPoint presentation, explaining our scheme and what we are trying to do.
If you would like me, or one of my colleagues, to come over to your community group/parish council/organisation to give a presentation about the OWLP scheme, or if you would like us to have a stall at your community event this summer, by all means please contact me; thank you.
Thanks to @SuttonIsle for duplicating the PP presentation on Dropbox – it may be quicker to download it through this link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/kibdnbt7j8u5tp3/owlp-pp-presentation-may-2014_for-blog.pdf
Workers from the Harrison family coppicing osier willows on Holt Island on the Great Ouse in St Ives. This was one of many locations up and down the river where willow was grown commercially for the basket-making business. J. Harrison & Son was founded by John Harrison in 1877. Image © Harrison family/Charlotte Jordan. Image kindly provided by Ian Jackson, St Ives Town Councillor.
April 2014 has finally arrived and the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership scheme has now officially been launched!
Tuesday night, representatives of the 26 key Partner organisations within the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership came together for a celebratory event. This was held appropriately along the Ouse Washes itself at the base of the banks along the Old Bedford River. Under a beautiful and warm sky, partners shared experiences and further confirmed their excitement and willingness to cooperate to make the OWLP scheme a great success for the area and its local communities.
Representatives from the key partners coming together near the Old Bedford.
Projects will start very soon
Over the next few months, a whole range of projects will start delivering. Almost all of our 25 projects will already start in the next six months. To give you a flavour of what to expect this spring and summer from the Partnership:
Some more information about these and the partnership’s other projects can be found in our OWLP synopsis document, downloadable from our Resources pages
How to get involved
As you can see from the above, selective, list of projects there will be something for everyone. For a large number of the above projects, we hope that local people will get involved to deliver the scheme, in the process learning more about the unique Ouse Washes heritage and obtaining new skills in the process.
We will keep you up-to-date of what’s going on and how you can get involved through this blog, our website (due to appear in July), our Twitter pages and through news articles in the local and regional media and in parish magazines. Hope to see you soon.
Related posts:
We are recruiting!
This is your chance to make a real difference to the landscape, wildlife, heritage and communities in and around the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership scheme’s area.
These are exciting times for us. Having received the excellent news from the Heritage Lottery Fund only a week ago that the HLF grants the OWLP scheme its stage 2 bid, we are now ready to expand the central OWLP team. Cambridgeshire ACRE, as the lead partner in the OWLP partnership, is now recruiting two people:
Where to find more information and how to apply:
Closing date and interviews:
You would like to know more?
Besides the information you can find in the various pages and posts on this OWLP blog, also visit the OWLP’s page on the Cambridgeshire ACRE’s website.
For an informal discussion, you can also contact me, the OWLP Programme Manager, at 01353 865030 or mark.nokkert@cambsacre.org.uk.
Yes! It is in the bag!
The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has just announced that the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership scheme will indeed receive £905,100 of HLF funding!
Since the partnership’s stage 2 bid in November 2013, the three files of paperwork we handed in have been assessed by the HLF’s regional team. Following this, the HLF’s East of England’s Regional Committee convened late last week to make the final, very positive, decision.
The Head of Heritage Lottery Fund East of England, Robyn Llewellynn said:
“What really impressed us about this project was the clear vision for celebrating the Ouse Washes. From working with people who live and visit the area, to developing innovative schemes to help wildlife thrive and flourish, our funding will connect the Fen stories of the past with opportunities for the future.”
Following the excellent news we have just received, we are now ready to start the partnership’s delivery phase, which will run until March 2017.
Watch this space: we will shortly get much more information out as to what is going to happen in your area and how you can get involved in our learning, access, conservation, engagement, volunteering, events and training programme.
We hope to see you soon at one of the many project activities and events we have lined up for you, to discover, protect and celebrate the unique Ouse Washes heritage.
See here the press release we sent out this week: Press Release_Ouse Washes LP_1 million from HLF (or download it from our Resources section).
The Ouse Washes LP landscape; Kite Aerial Photography by Bill Blake Heritage Documentation, All Rights Reserved
The OWLP landscape provides extensive wide views and contains huge skies, while being dominated by rivers, drains and ditches that cut across some of the most productive agricultural land in England. This landscape means different things to different people: some can find it featureless and intimidating whereas others find it exhilarating and value its tranquillity and distinctive lifestyles.
Now we have finalised the boundaries for the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership scheme and we have a defined area, the following question may need reconsidering: what is it that makes the OWLP area special?
In a previous post, I have set out what came out of workshops held regarding the unique qualities and ‘specialness’ and ‘distinctiveness’ of the OWLP area. As part of further discussions with our key partners, ongoing research and discussions with local community groups, we have been able to refine this information.
This then also fed into the Landscape Conservation Action Plan, a key document we recently submitted as part of our stage 2 bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund. The below word cloud formed part of our ‘Statement of Significance’ and sums up what we believe makes the OWLP area special:
Word cloud, summarising what makes the OWLP area special. Created using http://worditout.com
The OWLP landscape is of important for several reasons:
Internationally protected wildlife and wetlands
At 3,000 ha the Great Ouse Wetland network , which lies fully within the OWLP boundary, is one of the most extensive and most important wetland areas in the UK. It comprises of a network of nature reserves, many of which are owned by nature conservation bodies, including the WWT Welney, RSPB Ouse Washes nature, RSPB Fen Drayton Lakes and RSPB Ouse Fen reserves, with further schemes planned including those to be created by the Environment Agency near Sutton and Coveney. Within the heart of this landscape is the Ouse Washes itself, one of the most important areas of lowland wet grassland in Britain.
The expanding network of reserves form a crucial core area in the proposed Fen-wide ecological connectivity network of wetland habitats, crucial for the survival of many rare and endangered flora and fauna species. The restored wetland areas which incorporate a particular high percentage of lowland meadows and reedbeds provide for a tranquillity not easily found elsewhere.
Fen Drayton Lakes. Image by Sheils Flynn for OWLP scheme.
Rich Archaeology
The OWLP area is of at least national significance for its repository of well-preserved, often waterlogged archaeological and palaeo-environmental remains. The OWLP area contains 18 Scheduled Ancient Monuments, including the well-preserved Earith Civil War Bulwark and several clusters of prehistoric barrows. The area contains especially rich prehistoric and Roman Period archaeology. The abundance of prehistoric remains in the southern part of the OWLP area demonstrate clear evidence for a major prehistoric ceremonial landscape, extending right across the floor of the Great Ouse valley.
Amazing engineering history
This man-made landscape lies largely below sea level demonstrating man’s amazing efforts in drainage engineering, executed here on a grand scale: with its abundant sluices, banks and dykes the whole landscape can be considered as a civil engineering monument. Human intervention regarding its management is as vital today as it was when, in the 17th century, the Ouse Washes in between the Bedford Rivers were created. The survival of the nationally significant Bedford Level Corporation archival collection, curated for by Cambridgeshire Archives, provides us with a unique insight in the historic developments of the drainage schemes in the area.
Unique Experiments
The landscape has also played host to some amazing social, economic and environmental experiments including the Flat Earth Society using the landscape to prove the earth is disc-shaped, the utopian social living experiment at Colony Farm in Manea in the mid-19th century, and the late 20th century hovertrain experimental track.
Related posts:
As part of the development phase works we have reconsidered the boundary for the OWLP scheme area. This was included in the work done as part of the Landscape Character Assessment , commissioned by the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership to Sheils Flynn.
Redrawing the boundary
For our stage 1 submission, back in early 2012, the boundary drawn was still relatively simple. Not anymore. Following the recent finalisation of the Landscape Character Assessment for the OWLP area and the Landscape Conservation Action Plan as part of our stage 2 submission, I can now show you the final results of this work.
First of all, spot the differences:
Boundary as drawn for the OWLP’s stage 1 application, February 2012
OWLP boundary as defined for the stage 2 submission, November 2013. Map created by Sheils Flynn for OWLP. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2013 – not to be reproduced.
In their comments on our stage 1 bid, the HLF considered the OWLP area boundary somewhat vague and arbitrary; despite numerous hours of discussion between partners had already gone into this.
A coherent landscape
A requirement for the stage 2 submission was, thus, to come up with a better described, understood and more coherent boundary. The new landscape boundary is based on careful consideration of a number of related factors:
Crossing multiple boundaries
The OWLP area covers two Counties (Cambridgeshire and Norfolk), five different Districts (Kings Lynn & West Norfolk BC, Fenland DC, East Cambridgeshire DC, Huntingdonshire DC and South Cambridgeshire DC) and no less than 29 Parishes.
In the process of redefining the boundary for the OWLP landscape, the total area increased from 199 km2 at the stage 1 bid to 243 km2 now, stretching for 48.5 km between Denver and Downham Market at the northern end and Fen Drayton and St Ives to its south.
The OWLP residents
The OWLP area contains 25 villages/settlements which are either fully or partially within, or directly abutting the area’s boundary:
The resident population of the LP area is 33,010. Outside the Ouse Washes LP area the neighbouring towns within a c10km zone are Downham Market, Littleport, Ely, Chatteris, March, St Ives, Huntingdon and Cambridge; they have a collective resident population of 236,688. The OWLP scheme’s delivery phase focuses on both the local residents and market town residents.
Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership area – Location Map. Map created by Sheils Flynn for OWLP. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2013 – not to be reproduced.
Click on the above map (X 2) to zoom in; the maps displayed here can also be viewed in our Resources section.
What do you think?
What do you think? Does this boundary indeed reflect local people’s perceptions of what makes a coherent landscape? Let me know your thoughts – click on the balloon at the top to leave a comment, or contact me directly. Thank you.
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Ouse Washes: The Heart of the Fens 