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Fulbourn Fen

nature reserve in Cambridgeshire, England, UK

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 8, 2026
Entity authorityQ5507787
Source-derived summary

Fulbourn Fen is a 27.3-hectare (67-acre) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest east of Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire. It is privately owned and managed by the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire.

There are ancient meadows on calcareous loam and peat which have never been intensively farmed, so they have a rich diversity of flora and fauna. Herbs in drier areas include cowslip and salad burnet, while wetter areas have tall fen vegetation.

There is access by a track from Stonebridge Lane.

There are eight separately named woods in Fulbourn Fen:

The Cringles - north & north-east

Moat Wood - north-west

Thackets Wood - west

Ansett's Wood - south-west

Old Orchard - south

Hancock's Wood - central

Widow's Wood - south-east

Old Orchard - south

and five separate meadows:

Ox Meadow - west

Moat Meadow - north-west - the site of the remains of Zouches Manor

Long Fen Pasture - central

East Fen Pasture - east

Four Acre - south-east

Zouches Manor

Fulbourn Fen contains the moated remains of a Saxon manor known as Zouches Manor and then Dunmowes Manor. It was one of the Five Manors of Fulbourn and was built by Alan la Zouche, Earl of Brittany (the same family that held Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire).

Editorial summary

“Fulbourn Fen” enters the record as nature reserve in Cambridgeshire, England, UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fulbourn, nature and reserve can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 206-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Fulbourn, nature and reserve.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Fulbourn Fen” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Fulbourn, nature and reserve provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5507787.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Fulbourn Fen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.