Cambridge to Wicken Fen
Led by the National Trust, the new walking and cycling route being developed from Cambridge to Wicken Fen is one of the most rural schemes on Sustrans' national Big Lottery Funded project, situated in miles of flat, vast countryside.
It opens up a new walking and cycling route over 8 miles in length between the Trust's National Nature Reserve at Wicken Fen and its stately home and gardens at Anglesey Abbey, near Cambridge. The new route runs through the area of the Wicken Vision, the National Trust's ambitious plan to extend the nature reserve to cover around 53 square kilometres between Cambridge and Wicken Fen. This is the biggest project of its kind in lowland England, and will take many years.
As well as giving access to the expanding nature reserve the scheme will create many new circular routes between new and existing public rights of way, quiet roads and the string of fen-edge villages close by.
Three major new bridges, crossing the "lodes", the waterways which drain the whole area, are the key to the scheme. Two are already in place; the bridge over Swaffham Bulbeck Lode was opened in 2008, and the Reach Lode Bridge in September 2010. Splendid weather and a barbecue brought out over 200 people for the bridge opening, coming from the villages and Cambridge, walking, cycling or on horseback.
Planning permission was approved in December 2011, for a dual bridge across Burwell Lode, which will carry livestock as well as people (segregated from each other), but it looks unlikely, without significant new funding, that this new bridge will be open to meet the project timetables. Alternative arrangements are being looked at for users until the bridge is completed; it is already possible to cross the lode, lifting bikes over a stepped footbridge. Given this temporary challenge, the whole route, named "The Lodes Way", is already available and it is being well used.
Near Anglesey Abbey, residents of Lode village have long been asking for a signalled crossing of the busy B1102. It was opened in November 2010 and gives children and Lodes Way users a safer route to Bottisham and its Village College.
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To celebrate the project and create a place to relax and take photographs a Portrait Bench has been installed by the Reach Lode bridge. Alongside picnic tables and a special bench are life-size portraits in cut-out steel of three traditional fenland characters: an eel catcher, a Victorian entomologist with his butterfly net, and a skater.
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