This quotation from the monk Felix, who lived in the 8th century AD (see Darby 1974, p8, for details), described the East Anglian Fenland as it must have looked to the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside and for many centuries after the end of Roman Britain. Even today, as we see the Fens from a comfortable modern train going north from Cambridge through Ely to Peterborough, it looks like a flat alien landscape more akin to Holland than to the rest of England, a highly arable peat-land out of which rise low 'islands' bearing the towns and villages established mainly in Ssaxon times.