Edward Parnell

Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country


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and Grandad lived in a riverside cottage that came with the job. It too was a fairy-tale dwelling of sorts, located in a place whose own name was something of a misnomer: Surfleet Reservoir (though Seas End on maps), the latter word referring to the ultimately failed eighteenth-century plan to divert river water into an artificial lake to aid the drainage of local farmland. My grandparents’ post-war brick bungalow, a veritable palace among the nearby wooden holiday chalets and ramshackle fishermen’s huts that lined the Glen, was where my mother spent her teenage years before she left to marry my father beneath the leaning steeple of the main village’s church, moving six miles upriver to the house where I grew up. ‘The Res’ (as locals still refer to it) was an odd enclave populated by weekenders who moored their boats on the seaward side of the sluice – a deep tidal channel fringed by tall reeds – from where they would head out for a spot of sea fishing, or others who preferred to spend the summer sitting outside their chalets chatting to their neighbours while their children played in the river. By all accounts the place had a distinct sense of community back then, and even today has a different feel to the rest of the uniform, arable-dominated area – bringing to mind some timeless Dutch canal-side idyll.

      On the face of it there’s not much to get excited about: the first stretch skirts a grass-covered strip to the left and wide fields of crops to the right, while a barbed-wire fence borders the roadside ditch. Today it’s empty, but over the years various birds of interest alighted here before us: a pair of stonechats, neat little passerines, usually took up winter residence; once, a russet-barred sparrowhawk gripped a bloodied linnet in his talons; and in spring, Pinocchio-billed snipe crouched on the wooden posts in full view, their cryptic brown plumage offering no camouflage against the green of the backdrop. But the highlight was the ghost-lit barn owls that fluttered ethereally in our headlights, or materialised, seemingly from nowhere, in the late afternoon sunshine.

       Always you wanted owls.

      Past where the road jinks to the left and twists up the bank, bringing the river into view, is a pale-bricked barn that looked out of place, like some Spanish mission picked up and transposed to the middle of this flatness. Just beyond, tucked behind the bank, is a pond. We rarely saw anything on it – except once, when Mum braved treacherous snow on one of the fabled occasions when school was closed to drive the two of us along the track. The river was frozen solid, but not the pit: a redhead female smew, a small, toothed diving duck from the continent, had found the last ice-free stretch in the vicinity.

      The scene reminds me of an earlier remembrance – the first time I saw proper deep snow, which had fallen on our garden overnight, anaesthetising the land and deadening all sound. Dad and I placed sticks in the snow-hills that the wind had sculpted, marking each one with a makeshift wooden trig point that reminded me of the mountains I longed to climb on the holidays we took, far removed from those flatlands.

      The river is choppy, its banks a dirty green – there’s not a hint of snow in the sky – but I’m surprised by the new areas of wildlife habitat that have been cut alongside the water since the last time I was here: miniature inlets and scrapes, and a fledgling reedbed that would have been perfect back then for me to scan. In this same spot we watched transfixed on a correspondingly biting afternoon as a bare-chested man bobbed beside the river’s metal-reinforced far bank, a few strokes behind a paddling cow that he was trying to coax back onto dry land. My father knew him, he was a local farmer.

      At the aptly named Crowland, a parliament of rooks is feeding amid a ploughed beet crop. I slow as I pass the town’s Civil War-ruined abbey, commemorated in a gothic sonnet by the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare, whose village of Helpston is only nine miles away, and whose wife spent her dying days in my home town:

      On tombs whose sculptures half erased appear,

      On rank weeds, battening over human bones,

      Till even one’s very shadow seems to fear.

      I stop in the heart of the nothingness, pulling onto the head of a dirt drove that branches off at a right angle to the main route’s undulating, cracked tarmac. It’s a bleak place, the very same stretch of road where, as teenagers, my friends and I would switch off our headlights while motoring at speed, briefly plunging ourselves into blindness. We were young and rash, fortunate not to suffer the classic Fenlander’s end and find ourselves drowning in two foolish feet of lonely water at the bottom of one of the ubiquitous steep-sided dykes that line those routes. A patch of ice at the wrong moment could have created a local tragedy and transformed us into a carload of ghouls.