John Gallas, a poet from New Zealand, spends much of his time in Sutton St James. His most recent collection of poems is Billy ‘Nibs’ Buckshot (Carcanet, 2024), and three of his poems will be in Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined (Five Leaves Publications, 2025), due to be published as part of this project. Here, he takes us on a bike ride through fenland.

From Sutton St James to Fosdyke Bridge and back is a regular bike-outing for me: up to Long Sutton, through Lutton, up to Gedney Drove End, along to Dawsmere, then Holbeach St Matthew, Holbeach St Marks, Middle Marsh Road, and finally a neat little bike track beside the A17 to the Yacht Haven, where I take a selfie with lots of sails and water in the background in case anyone doubts me. The unending A17 traffic wobbles the bridge and blows you sideways. The Ship Inn has been emptied, rebuilt, refilled and the carpark is once more nearly full.

On the way back, I often count traffic. Last week, the count was 2: 1 tractor, 1 delivery van. Things liven up from Gedney Drove End, but the windy – that’s weindy – Wash road is always an empty shush. The villages are quiet, apart from the welcome screams at Holbeach St Marks Primary School playground. The road between the Saints is filled with giant sawn-off tree-trunks, cut down for safety after the 2023 typhoon. The way is still littered with branches.

Sometimes I go back from Moulton Marsh Nature Reserve down the long, straight dull road, crossing the A17 at a wheeling run, for a bit of dangerous entertainment, to Moulton Seas End, Moulton, Fen Air and home. I like the empty wild, wet and weeds of that way (Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Inversnaid’: ‘O let them be left, wildness and wet. / Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet’ – dead right, Mr Hopkins), with the added homely whiff from the mighty Bakkavor Pizza & Bread chimneys.

Sometimes there are roadworks – small drainage or surface problems – but, on a bike, you can always get through. There a plenty of fields, hedgerows, cow-corners, copses and sea-defence banks for timely little detours. I once passed a Road Controller fast asleep in the grass at the top of Red Cow Drove: no one had asked the way, or what the Diversion was … or where it went … or anything. Where the roadworks were, I never discovered.  

If there is a delivery van, it is usually lost. The winds are, well, unreliable, and often seem to be behind you, whichever way you turn. (This is a trip recommendation for a bike.) The sea is untantalizingly always near-but-not-visible. And overhead there are usually a few jets doing bombing practice on orange wrecks in the Wash, and, recently, nasty, huge, black military helicopters roaming the coast like malevolent insects. Gedney Drove End would be a good place to have a break, but there aren’t any shops. Pedal on, there is something at last back in Long Sutton.

I’ll always go back, again and again, that way. It’s quiet almost beyond belief, and I’m very fond of the horses at Bleak House Farm, the weird barn with a light always on at Holbeach St Matthew, the super-pot-hole near the Nature Reserve, the ancient, unrepaired yachts and ships at the Bridge, the free-apple trees, the million pheasants, the peacocks before the lighthouse near Sutton Bridge, and that bloody dog at Not Telling, that howls, drools and gallops along the fenceline fit to kill, that I am tempted to taunt … but never do.