Clare Hall PhD student and poet Jade Cuttle, selected as a BBC New Generation Thinker through the Arts and Humanities Research Council scheme that brings academic research to national radio, recently appeared on BBC Radio 3’s Sunday Feature. In the programme, she retraced the fenland journeys of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and reflected on his enduring ties to Cambridge.

The broadcast centred on In the Fen Country from 1904, Vaughan Williams’ earliest acknowledged composition. As an undergraduate at Trinity College, where he read history and music, he regularly travelled from Cambridge to Ely Cathedral for morning services. Most often he went by bicycle or train, but during the severe winter of 1894 he even skated along the frozen Cam and Great Ouse. The expansive horizons of the fens, and the folk songs he gathered there, would later shape his musical imagination.

Following the same route along the River Cam and out into the marshland, Jade considered what this landscape offers to artists past and present. She spoke with her former undergraduate supervisor, Dr Alyson Tapp of Clare College, now a gardener at the College, about Vaughan Williams’ attachment to the fens. She also met her current PhD supervisor, Professor Robert Macfarlane of Emmanuel College, to explore the region’s complex reputation. Though often described in bleak terms by earlier writers, the fens have proved a surprisingly fertile ground for creativity.

Reflecting on the wide skies and striking flatness of the fen country, Jade suggested that its openness creates space for ideas to take root. Her feature highlights Vaughan Williams’ legacy as a Cambridge student and invites today’s scholars to look beyond the city’s courts and cloisters to the landscapes just beyond.

You can explore more of Jade’s work at www.jadecuttle.co.uk and follow her updates on social media at @JadeCuttle.