Fen Cottage (also known as The Fenman's Cottage) Wicken

Summary

Fen Cottage is a rare survival of a fen dweller’s cottage from around 1700 with later phases. It was built from materials gathered locally including walls of clay “bats” and peat blocks and sedge roofing thatch.

Reasons for Designation

Fen Cottage, a humble fen dweller’s cottage built in around 1700 with later phases and built from locally gathered materials, is listed for the following principal reasons:

Historic Interest:
* as a rare surviving example of a fen-dweller’s cottage;
* for its early fabric, some of which dates to the early-C18;
* different phases of building are legible in the surviving fabric, showing how it was adapted to successive generations of fen-dwellers.

Architectural Interest:
* for the use of distinctive local building materials including clay “bats”, peat blocks, sedge thatch and willow branches.

History

The original cottage was built around 1700, one of many such cottages in the hamlet of “the Lode” outside of Wicken village. Lodes were man-made waterways dug out in medieval times (or some even earlier) to control the water levels of the fens and later also used for transporting of goods. The fen dwellers made their living by cutting sedge (mainly for roof thatching), digging for peat (known as turf), digging clay (used for brick making, building and making pamment floor tiles), gathering buckthorn (used to make gunpowder), and hunting and trapping birds, eels and fish.

In around 1800, the cottage was extended towards the north. Later in the C19, a lean-to kitchen was added to the original cottage, and in the early C20 the roof to the extended area was damaged in a storm, and it was rebuilt with a raised roofline to allow for a sleeping loft.

The cottage was home to Charles and Jane Butcher in the mid C19, with four generations of the family eventually living in the cottage. The last residents were Alice and her disabled son Reggie Butcher, who lived in the cottage until 1972, when Alice died, aged 93. In the mid-C20 a bedroom had been added to the ground floor for Reggie, who was unable to climb the ladders to the sleeping loft.

The National Trust acquired the cottage in 1974 and restored it between 1988 and 1990. It has been opened to the public each summer as part of its visitor attraction at Wicken Fen.

Details

Materials

The roof structure is timber, with sedge thatch covering to the southern range and clay pantiles to the northern range.

The external walls are of clay "bats”, lined with peat blocks, with a light willow frame. The exterior is lime-washed.

There are brick chimney stacks and brick corner reinforcements to the walls.

Some interior walls are formed of sedge with clay daub on a light willow frame.

The floors are of clay pamments. The verandah is timber with a corrugated iron cover.

Plan

The building has an irregular plan, consisting of a thatched range with a central stack, and a smaller, pantiled range attached to the north end, with a chimney stack at its north end. There is a small range perpendicular to the rear (south-east) of the pantiled range, and a verandah to the rear of the thatched range.

Exterior

The building is single storied. All roofs are gabled and all walls are lime-washed. The northern, pantiled range has a higher roofline than the thatched range.

There are multi-pane casement windows in the main (west) elevation and each range has a simple wide-plank timber door.


The south gable end is blind except for a small square window at attic level. The south wall of the extension to the rear is weatherboarded.

The rear (east) elevation has a horizontal multi-pane sliding sash window to the southern end, beneath a simple open-sided verandah. The central extension immediately north of this contains a multi-pane casement window. The northern extension, immediately north of this, has a weather-boarded gable end, with a small square window beneath it.

The northern end is blind, with the chimney stack subsumed within the wall. The north-west corner is supported by a low-height brick buttress topped with pantiles.

Interior

The interior of the thatched range retains back-to-back fireplaces between the two original rooms. The fireplaces have early C20 cast-iron fire-surrounds. Beside the fireplaces a plank door leads from the living room to the bedroom. The bedroom has a plank floor and leads into the C20 room built for Reggie. The bedroom also contains a ladder leading to a sleeping loft.

An internal door in the living room leads into the extended kitchen area with an iron range cooker and a bread oven. This area leads in turn into a pantry, and then the single room that originally formed the second cottage.

Inside this room a section of the original gable end wall to the thatched range has had had its render removed and the structure of sedge and clay has been displayed behind a glass panel. The room retains its large open fireplace. The ceiling is open to the plank loft floor. A ladder leads up to the loft sleeping area.

Sources

Books and journals
Pevsner, Nikolaus, Bradley, Simon, The Buildings of England: Cambridgeshire, (2013)
Sedgwick, Isabel, Wicken Fen, A Souvenir Guide (National Trust), (2016)

Websites
National Trust Wicken Fen, accessed 7 Nov 2025 from https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/wicken-fen-nature-reserve/features/fen-cottage-and-workshop
Cambridgeshire’s Local List, accessed 7 Nov 2025 from https://local-heritage-list.org.uk/cambridgeshire/asset/10514

End of official list entry

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