The Great Fen – the challenges of creating a wild landscape in lowland England

In 2007, I outlined in British Wildlife the creation of one of Britain's first landscape-scale projects - the Great Fen, in Cambridgeshire (Bowley 2007). This was originally intended to link two national nature reserves, and to achieve better management of flood water, but the objectives of the project soon expanded to include social, cultural and local-community benefits.