Discover Market Weston Fen To walk through Market Weston Fen is to journey back in time, treading lightly through a landscape lucky to have escaped the onslaught of drainage and agricultural improvement. Saved from the 20th century urge to industrialise every inch of wild land, it is now one of Suffolk’s richest botanical sites.
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Wild Suffolk | Spring / Summer 2022
A rare example of unspoilt valley fen, Market Weston Fen was one of the few places that survived as Suffolk’s rivers were engineered and the wetlands were drained in the 20th century. As wild areas shrank and fragmented, Market Weston Fen remained highly biodiverse and the chalk springs that feed the site today are the same as those that did so millennia ago. Nevertheless, when Suffolk Wildlife Trust acquired the site in 1981, conditions were declining. Overgrown and mismanaged, the fen needed cutting and the drier areas of heathland were overwhelmed by bracken. Fast forward forty years, and thanks to careful management and the support of a legacy left by David Feavearyear, we have expanded the reserve and Market Weston Fen has been restored to its former, beautiful glory. Only a handful of sites in Suffolk have
such a high abundance of wildlife, and this ultra-biodiverse hotspot boasts over 250 species of flowering plants. A winding path takes you through meadow, fenland, heathland and wet woodland. Areas rich in orchids, including marsh fragrant, southern marsh and marsh helleborine (which number in the thousands), are interspersed with ponds, wet woodland and Breckland dominated by buttery gorse and mature birch trees. In spring, you’ll be greeted by the scratchy rhythms of reed and sedge warblers, the frenetic burst of Cetti’s warblers and the gentle reeling of the grasshopper warbler. Buzzards soar overhead, mewing gently to one another as they Marsh circle upwards on warm helleborine. columns of air. As the
