In 1901 Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925), the famous author of swashbuckling adventure novels such as 'She' and 'King's Solomon's Mines', travelled through Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire.
In the Huntingdonshire village of Bluntisham he saw new cottages which had been built to house agricultural labourers. They showed a marked improvement over the earlier cottages on which Karl Marx had commented.
"They were very excellent dwellings," Haggard recorded, "erected with much taste, containing three bed and two sitting rooms. The great point about them was that they were roofed with the best of thatching material, sedge, which is warm in winter and very cool in summer, as I proved by visiting the top rooms on that scorching day... Of course its drawback is the liability to fire, but as Mr Tebbutt pointed out, there was no record in his neighbourhood of any life being lost through such an incident."
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Photograph of a cottage in Bluntisham, showing the sedge roof, from Rider Haggard's 'Rural England.' (Cambridgeshire Libraries: C.30)
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Earlier in his journey Haggard had seen the sedge being cut, at Wicken Lode in Cambridgeshire. "Then came two barges laden with towering loads of brown sedge, that makes the best thatching in the world," he wrote.
"Alas! the plant is growing rare. It takes four years to mature, and then, if good, fetches one pound a load."
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Sedge growing in Wicken Lode, Cambridgeshire. From Rider Haggard's 'Rural England.'
(Cambridgeshire Libraries: C.30)
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