Woodlands Farm

The Peterborough-Spalding rail link over the fens. March, frozen feet, I stand by an open window as the train rattles east. I am raised over black seas, going away from the sun-setting west, reassuring pink, away into blue and purple, towards the windy edge of the Wash.

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This time of day distorts perception. Lines of trees are whiskered onto a bowl of sky like rare mould growth. Jet trails over the horizon are fragmenting, silver as silverfish. The evening's violet cloud banks are phantom hills to me, coming from the south where to look down from above is to see half my county from a chalk ridge. But here in the fens a railway embankment gives enough perspective to look out across fields swimming shade and last light. Here is almost underwater, almost tidal.

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Criss-crossing dykes and cutting over plough, we are up here just above sea-level, above soil-level, and it's as though we are trying to take off on a long runway into night. Red brick villages with dark slate roofs huddle either side of the railway line. These settlements seem to be inhabited only by yellow lights and satellite dishes.

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This is bulb country with poly-tunnels striped over vast prairies, and as the train shudders onwards the stripes flicker away into serial vanishing points. Later, in May, when I will next make this journey, potato plants will be showing on ridges between trenches, alternating black and green, black and green, soil and leaf.

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God's dripping pan, they call this place. Put anything on or in the ground here and it tends to grow, and fast it reaches down, makes root, makes the most of the mysterious dark earth and the picked-clean skies. Everything grows. Like crops. Like hedgerows. Like weeds - willow weed, persicaria, dog daisy, camomile, creeping thistle, bindweed, fat hen and the rest.

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I can almost believe the houses here began as sheds that grew and grew, putting roots down, digging in, as I am doing.

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