![]() ![]() Out there, beyond the foggy windscreen and white lines, was the forest. ![]() Out! I pulled on jeans, boots and a jumper, scalded my mouth with burnt coffee, and it was only when my frozen, ancient Volkswagen and I were halfway down the A14 that I worked out where I was going, and why. Must get out, I thought, throwing back the covers. At five in the morning I’d been staring, sleepless, at a square of streetlight on the ceiling. ![]() It’s called the Brecklands – the broken lands – and it’s where I ended up that morning, seven years ago, in early spring, on a trip I hadn’t planned at all. In spring it’s a riot of noise: constant plane traffic, gas-guns over pea fields, woodlarks and jet engines. There are spaces built for air-delivered nukes inside grassy tumuli behind 12ft fences, tattoo parlours and US Air Force golf courses. There are ghosts here: houses crumble inside numbered blocks of pine forestry. It’s a land of twisted pine trees, burnt-out cars, shotgun-peppered road signs and US Air Force bases. It’s where wet fen gives way to parched sand. Forty-five minutes north-east of Cambridge is a landscape I’ve come to love very much indeed. ![]()
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