Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Marshy land; fens; specifically, in England, the marshy region in Cambridge, Norfolk, Lincoln, and adjacent counties, now in great part reclaimed.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun a kind of low-lying ground, often
wet ormarshy
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun low-lying wet land with grassy vegetation; usually is a transition zone between land and water
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word fenland.
Examples
-
In the morning the water was back on, and I felt very grateful to some poor soul who had probably had to spend a freezing night in a fenland ditch somewhere, digging up pipes.
-
Years ago, on hearing that my family would be moving from Cornwall to fenland Lincolnshire, a friend's father sympathised: I was stationed there during the war.
Letters: Blood ban 2011
-
The river Tern, which flows south from the Weald Moors – an ancient fenland that had been drained by the 18th century – met the Severn at Atcham and backed up across fields into parkland at Attingham.
-
The fenland landscape may be flat and dreary; these stories are anything but.
This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor – review 2012
-
Years ago, on hearing that my family would be moving from Cornwall to fenland Lincolnshire, a friend's father sympathised: I was stationed there during the war.
Letters: Blood ban 2011
-
The 30 fiercely imagined stories in Jon McGregor's collection share an extraordinary topophilia: each bears as its subtitle the name of a fenland town or village, and even in tales that range widely across space and time we never lose touch with the flat Lincolnshire landscape.
This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor – review 2012
-
Startlingly white in this green and yellow landscape, it is a refreshing curve amongst the fenland horizontals.
A Bridge for Sergeant Pike Peter Ashley 2008
-
I found this one on my fenland tour whilst out picking-off candidates for Classic Constructs, a new book for later on in the year.
Water Marks Peter Ashley 2008
-
Drifting curtains of fenland rain obscured everything from 20 yards so that, pedalling round the perimeter, the only indications of intense activity were waves of clatter from each dispersal as ground crews completed the arming of the Lancasters.
-
Drifting curtains of fenland rain obscured everything from 20 yards so that, pedalling round the perimeter, the only indications of intense activity were waves of clatter from each dispersal as ground crews completed the arming of the Lancasters.
vendingmachine commented on the word fenland
"A saltern is a word with a number of differing (but interrelated) meanings. In English archaeology, a saltern is an area used for salt making, especially in the East Anglian fenlands."
August 25, 2016