All roads to Foulpuddle are dead ends.
The sooner this dump is swallowed up by the sea, the better.
So dull, even migrating birds don’t stop!
The six members of Foulpuddle Parish Council listened in silence, shivering, as the contents of the Visitor Comments Box were read out. Council meetings were already salted with envy, for the Great Eel Festival at Marshwick, just up the road, was in its third triumphant year.The Fenland Gazette had a photo gallery of rippling silvery banners, volunteers in I ♥️ EELS T-shirts, hundreds of visitors, and a huge foam-rubber eel that shimmied through the crowds in silver-painted waders. Foulpuddle Parish Council were convinced that Jim Platt, grandstanding mayor of Marshwick, was inside the eel suit. They were bitterly aware that few festival-goers followed the road onward and eastward, through the marshes, past mudbanks and tidal inlets, to the village of Foulpuddle and the North Sea beyond.
“What makes me simply livid,” said Gloria Shaw, landlady of the Jolly Eel pub, “is that by rights the Festival should be here. It was our idea, and Marshwick stole it. Jim Platt must have bugged the Council Chamber.” The Council Chamber was a one-room hall, used by the knitting group on Mondays and the carpet bowls club on Thursdays. Now in late October, the ancient heating system had failed. The Parish Council hunched over their tea and biscuits, wrapped in winter woollies and dejection.
Ray Owen, the local historian, reminded them again that Foulpuddle, not Marshwick, had been home to an eel-canning works. Now ruined and lapped by the spreading salt marshes, its once-imposing structure lay at the extreme end of a silted-up canal. The Victorian entrepreneur who had built the factory and canal, back in the 1860s, had quickly realised his mistake and moved his operations inland.
The Comments Box contained more bile:
The so-called ‘pub’ serves the worst food ever.
The clue’s in the name. Fall in the mud here, and you’ll never get rid of the stink!
Ray was furious at the insult to the village’s name since every reputable historian knew the origin of Foulpuddle was ‘a watercourse frequented by fowl’. Gloria found the pub comment most hurtful. She said it was probably Jim Platt who wrote those things, it would be just like him.
The Parish Council adjourned, agreeing on a single-item agenda for their next meeting: How To Put Foulpuddle Back on the Map. “And teach those buggers in Marshwick a lesson,”
Ray said, as they left the building and plunged into the cold fen-mist.
One low-tide morning in January 1989, the first clear day after a violent storm surge, Gloria Shaw was walking her dog on the old canal towpath when she noticed a row of blackened spars poking from the mud. She rang the Archaeology Department at Fenland University, who sent a carbon-dating expert to investigate. The rest, say the guidebooks, is history.
Once the remains had been identified as an unusually well-preserved Roman cargo ship, Foulpuddle was swamped with archaeologists, historians, film crews, and sightseers. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. The Jolly Eel, which had been full only once in living memory (a sighting of the rare Western Sandpiper having attracted a horde of twitchers) was booked solid for months. Gloria drafted in two chambermaids and an extra chef. She bought new bedlinen and revamped her menu, which had previously offered a choice of eel pie and chips, sausage-and-mash with onion gravy, and lasagne.
Cameras recorded every step of the operation to extract the ship’s carcass from the mud. Also retrieved was its cargo of fifty-three unbroken amphorae, containing traces of fish sauce and olive oil for Caesar’s armies. A TV documentary about the salvage operation, and the ship’s removal to a purpose-built ‘Romans in Fenland’ museum, was fronted by a celebrity historian. Still more visitors were drawn to the village by her aura of suppressed passion and wild flame-red hair, like a pre-Raphaelite Boudicca - the subject, as it happened, of her PhD thesis.
Long before the crowds departed, Foulpuddle Parish Council had begun working on plans for an ‘Ides of June’ summer festival, to feature a fancy dress parade led by the Parish Council in togas, and an Imperial banquet on the village green.
One day towards the end of filming, Jim Platt shyly approached the Celebrity Historian, hoping to pitch an idea for a documentary about Marshwick’s medieval past. She brushed him off politely. “I’m so sorry, but we’re on a very tight schedule. Gloria, I just need a quick word with you please?”
The Mayor of Marshwick retreated, with slumped shoulders. Gloria Shaw thought she had never known a sweeter moment - unless it was on that evening in summer 1957 when she and Jim lay together in mud-scented cordgrass, while he whispered that they were the Romeo and Juliet of the marshlands.
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