Celia Fiennes (1662-1741), a contemporary of Daniel Defoe and daughter of a colonel in Cromwell’s army, began her travels around the age of 22 'to regain my health by variety and change of aire and exercise,' and was very much of the opinion that everyone could benefit from the same: ‘if all persons, both Ladies, much more gentlemen, would spend some of their tyme in journeys to visit their native Land [it] would be a sovereign remedy to cure or preserve from these epidemick diseases of vapours, should I add Laziness?’
Travelling on horseback,often in the company of just two servants, Celia visited every county in England as well as making brief forays into Scotland and Wales. She first travelled through Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1697 passing through Babraham and Cambridge which she initially dismissed with the comment ‘the Buildings are old and indifferent, the Streets mostly narrow’.
After a trip to Hinchingbrooke House, she proceeded, via Stilton, to Whittlesey Mere. Once one of lowland England’s largest freshwater lakes, Celia found it an imposing sight; ‘a great water on the right hand about a mile off which looked like some Sea it being so high and of a great length...there is no coming near it in a mile or two, the ground is all wett and marshy but there are severall little channels run into it which by boats people go up to this place; when you enter the mouth of the Mer it looks formidable and is often very dangerous by reason of sudden winds that rise like Hurricanes in the Mer.’
|
John Bodger’s map of Whittlesey Mere, 1786. Bodger calculated that its waters covered 1,870 acres; it measured 3 and a half miles from east to west and 2 and a half from north to south and varied in depth from 2 to 7 feet. (Cambridgeshire Archives)
|
Celia comments on how ‘people boat it round the Mer with pleasure’ when the weather permits and we have a record of the Earl of Orford’s ‘voyage’ around the Mere and River Nene with a flotilla of 9 boats in the summer of 1744. In winter, when its waters froze, the Mere became a popular venue for skating and sleighing.
|
A regatta on Whittlesey Mere in 1842 pictured in H.M. Heathcote’s ‘Reminiscences of Fen and Mere’ originally published in 1876, more than twenty years after the Mere had been drained. It is now hard to believe it was ever there.
|
Celia Fiennes returned to this area the following year as part of ‘My Great Journey to Newcastle and Cornwall’ visiting Ely; ‘only a harbour to breed and nest vermin in’, Chippenham Park and Sutton.
There is some debate whether Celia’s accounts of her travels were ever intended for a wider audience than immediate family and friends. Although completed in 1702 they were not published in full until 1888 when they appeared under the title ‘Through England on a Side Saddle’.