"In 1630, King Charles I granted a drainage charter to the 4th Earl of Bedford who engaged the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to construct the two Bedford rivers. The purpose of the new rivers was to facilitate drainage of the Great Ouse between Earith and Downham Market. The area between the rivers is 20 miles (32 km) long and almost a mile wide and acts as washland, i.e. a floodplain during the winter and, increasingly, also in summer. When they are flooded this causes a 30-mile (48 km) detour for local residents."
With the sat-nav behaving it takes about an hour to get to the Ouse Washes. The road through the little village of Welney is a succession of right-angle bends to the north of the Old Bedford river. It then finds its way through the wetlands between the two great canals, crosses the New Bedford river and the "hundred foot bank", turns sharply left and runs parallel to the bank until it reaches the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve.
There are beautiful low-level lights at regular intervals round the car park, and in the visitor centre the lights are on. I am reminded again how wealthy this organisation is. Peter Scott would not recognise the trust which he began from a cottage at Slimbridge seventy years ago. It is all designer-experience - sleek wood cladding, curves, spotlights, murals of nature looking so much more appealing than the bleak flat landscape around. The doors are open so he walks in past an empty foyer, an unmanned welcome desk and only the distant voices of the cleaners.
I am parked up in a lay-by a few hundred metres from the wetland centre, decide this is OK for the night, and go round locking all the doors. The curtains and blinds are down, carefully placed led lighting on and the heater humming as it blows warm air onto my cold feet. My meal will be a one-pan special - celery, broccoli, a little rice, and some chunky pieces of very tasty chorizo sausage with a couple of glasses of red wine . The evening is spent with real coffee, the computer, a second reading Atonement by Ian McEwan, and a long session deleting photographs and processing the chosen few.
10 December 2015
As
the daylight slowly grows I hear the magical sound of hundreds of whooper swans
flying over to a field half a mile away where they are landing to feed. The
reserve doesn't open until 10 so I decide to go for a walk along the bank. As
soon as I reach the top I can see that there is plenty of water here and lots
of birds too, but my attention is focussed on a flock of sheep grazing on this
very long, very narrow and very steep field. Will I be able to creep past them
if I go down to the fence? At first it looks as if they will do the sensible
thing and let me past, but no, as always with these infuriating creatures they
run on ahead. 
By the time I decide to return to the van I have driven them half
a mile from where they wanted to be. More fools they. At 10 I show my membership card and ask why they open so late. The WWT headquarters at Slimbridge allows us in at 8.15. It seems the staff work until 8 in the evening, the last hour being a floodlit swan feeding spectacular. I must have missed it last night. Anyway, it's a good bright but cool and windy day with lots of lovely birds including this Marsh Harrier with the godwits pretending to be frightened by it:
I also love getting more intimate pictures of the smaller birds like these goldfinches feeding on teasels:
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