Just outside a small and faintly unassuming village called Sutton, in the heart of East Anglia, there is a road called Sutton Gault. The asphalt is battered and cracked from years of trucks rumbling down to the immense farm at the end of that road. These trucks, intermittent joggers, and the occasional dog walkers are the only real traffic that road receives. But, if an unthinking jogger were to veer off their usual path and run across the fen, they would find something extraordinary amongst the wet, windswept emptiness. For if you visit that fen today, you will gain a better understanding than anywhere else of the history of how man has failed the environment.

Three concrete pillars, hardly taller than a child, rise out of the grass. Driven into them are metal rods, clearly denoting a larger superstructure either demolished or eroded by the Fenland gales. By now, the surrounding villages of Sutton or Earith cannot be seen. The jogger would feel entirely isolated, the only sign of human habitation on that fen being the crops which blow aimlessly upon the floodplain and those three concrete pillars. Who put them there? Why are they so far from the road? And how can they possibly tell a global story?

These three concrete pillars are the final remnants of Britain’s only “hovertrain.” They are the last remaining supports of a track constructed between 1967 and 1974 that could, had it been completed, have ferried passengers from London to Birmingham in twenty minutes and London to Edinburgh in ninety. The track, resting on countless more of these concrete pillars, would have encircled the whole country. A cushion of air would have levitated this vision of the future and magnets propelled it. Yet all that remains of this dream is three concrete pillars, slowly sinking into the fen. This hovertrain and the fen it stands on are a microcosm of man’s two greatest failures to nature – this local failure telling the story of a global, environmental tragedy.

There is a sense of overwhelming despair to this little triumvirate, gradually succumbing to wind and mud when they could have sparked a revolution in transport and technology. This modern Ozymandias is all that is left of the innovation and knowledge spoken of by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, in his 1963 speech at the Labour Party Conference in Scarborough. Wilson thundered that he would “forge a new Britain in the white heat of technology.” By 1967, the fen, only ten minutes from my home, had become that forge. But it would end, not with a spark, but with an ember.

The hovertrain’s track was built in a vast, futuristic hanger in Earith – though a visitor today would hardly know it. Faced with Earith’s One Stop and quiet post office, few would imagine that many of its more elderly residents worked on this futuristic dream, that they were part of history. That they welded the tracks together, sunk the pillars into the fen, drove the cars to pull that enormous metal serpent into position. That they lovingly fixed and mended its ailments, watched as the first experimental model floated as if by sorcery on its cushion of air, gasped as (in 1973) it achieved its top speed of 107mph: on track to reach its ultimate speed of 250mph.

But historians and politicians were already growing skeptical of Wilson’s promises. The white heat was spluttering, and allegations of incompetence and inconsistency were beginning to fly. Though he delivered on his Ministry of Science and Education, Wilson actually scrapped numerous technological projects – most famously the TRS-2 aircraft, but also the hovertrain. All because of cost.

The death of Sutton and Earith’s hovertrain represents the first of man’s failures towards nature. It is a local microcosm of man’s global failure to support his environment as it supports him. The train never advanced beyond that experimental model, which now gathers dust in Peterborough’s Railway Museum. Swans swim around the last flooded remnants of the track, which no-one thought was important enough to remove. The hovertrain would have halved both journey times and the country’s carbon emissions. It would have heralded a golden age of environmental travel, whose benefits would have far outweighed immediate expenses. But instead, more roads were built, more cars driven and more fossil fuels burnt. The hovertrain is a microcosm of man’s perennial and global unwillingness to adapt to save his own environment.

Stories like this exist across the globe: Tehran, Orlando, Jakarta, Seattle. Planned monorails and magnetic levitation projects all end in scandal, financial mismanagement or being replaced by thoroughfares. Environmental history (the study of human interaction with the natural world) tells us that man always goes with the familiar, with what he knows, when it comes to the environment. He would rather continue to burn fossil fuels and slowly roast his own planet, which admits he was wrong and found a new idea. This is the first of the lessons about man’s environmental failure that can be learnt from that unassuming fen and its history.

The second of man’s great environmental failures that can be learnt here is within the fen itself. The flooded, sinking roads tell an even more distressing tale of man’s relationship with the world around him. In 1630, a group of wealthy landowners headed by the Earl of Bedford set out to drain the fens. At the behest of King Charles I, they planned to use the land that had supported its people for centuries of agriculture and thus commerce. They succeeded – and turned the fens into yet another generator of wealth as the capitalist world has done globally across history. They called themselves “The Gentlemen Adventurers” and, for avarice, they precipitated what the historian Ian Rotherham calls “the greatest single ecological catastrophe that ever occurred in England.”

The hideous rape of the landscape caused by the Gentlemen Adventurers is best expressed in the road run-in between Sutton and Earith, the road that would come to replace the cancelled hovertrain. It is often flooded, and it leans at 45⁰ to the right, so anyone who drives on it feels alarmingly as if they are sinking into the fen. The drainage destroyed the foundations of the fens and left them horribly susceptible to this erosion. With bitter irony, the fens are now more likely to flood than ever and (thanks to the Gentlemen Adventurers) the roads around my house spend much of their time under water. Just as the three concrete pillars sunk into them teach that man refuses to adapt to save the natural world, the fen itself teaches that we have instead simply raped our own habitat for greed.

If anyone wishes to see and learn from the two greatest failures of mankind, all they must do is visit the fens. As you drive along the fen roads, you feel centuries of drainage dragging the groaning and pockmarked tarmac into the mud. As you park your car, unable to traverse the flooded paths, you must tentatively cross a shaking footbridge. You must walk out over floodplains, full of crops that should not be there. You must stop by a bend in the path to observe three concrete pillars. All that is left of Britain’s attempt to avert its ecological destruction. A train that could have been the answer to car born emissions scrapped due to cost, resting on a fen slowly sinking because of our need to exploit it. Even in my own local fen, can a more global story exist that man’s avarice and his contempt towards nature? To an environmental historian, nowhere could be a greater microcosm of the global story of mankind’s failure to protect his environment and himself from oblivion.

Photo: Railworld's RTV 31 at Earith, ready for a test run, May 1973; photo by Environmental City, CC BY-SA 4.0; via Wikimedia Commons.