River Nene, Great Ouse, The Fens Holiday Guides & Maps

The East Anglian Waterways offer an unique and beautiful cruising area, scattered with interesting villages and market towns, but often there’s just land and sky and utter solitude! Cruising is on the increase and more facilities are being installed.

The River Nene

The River Nene takes a twisting course to Peterborough through pleasant rural surroundings, becoming tidal as it crosses the flat Fenlands on its way to the sea. You can enter the Middle Levels which provide a way to avoid the difficult tidal stretch via hundreds of miles of peaceful waterways. The Nene originally joined the Great Ouse to flow together into the Wash, but the course of the Great Ouse was moved in the twelfth century to a more easterly outlet near King’s Lynn. Nature, and then man from the Romans onward, have been continually altering watercourses of this large area of marshes between and around the rivers to farm the rich soils.

The River Great Ouse

The Great Ouse flows over 70 miles from Bedford out into the Wash, linking to the River Cam coming down from Cambridge and a series of other navigable rivers along its way.

The Middle Levels

The Middle Levels are a network of rivers, manmade drainage ditches and sluices intended to drain the low lying area between Peterborough and the cathedral city of Ely. However they also offer a navigable route between the River Nene and the fenland rivers. The Dutch engineer Vermuyden created many of them when he drained the Fens in the 17th century. One of them, the Old Bedford Level, runs dead straight for 20 miles and was the location for a series of experiments in the 19th and early 20th centuries to prove, or disprove that the Earth was round.