In the mid-17th century, Penny of Wisbech led a crowd of thousands to Ely to protest at the draining of the fens. They sang one of the earliest modern protest songs, written from the perspective of an eel.
This captivating detail of our landscape's social history appears in Bonnie Lander Johnson's Vanishing Landscapes: The Story of Plants and How We Lost Them. It's nestled in a gripping, conversational and carefully researched story of how the old crafts and livelihoods of fenlanders, highlanders, cidermakers, saffron farmers and others, were lost to a new force of enterprise: the dreams of the modern corporation.
