The Ouse Washes Website

Three-quarters of a mile south of Sutton Gault there is a curious feature of the Washes. The norh-west barrier bank of the Old Bedford River has a large loop or kink in it known as "The Gullet" but the river continues in a straight line, shown as light blue with dark blue edges. Another man-made watercourse shown solid dark blue and known as the Counterdrain follows the line of the kink.

map: OS.
In dry conditions this is a peaceful, grassy area where horses often graze; in wet weather it can become damp or swampy in the centre; and when the Ouse Washes are flooded this area can be too.
satellite view by Google
This can all be seen imore easily in the satellite view. The dark line going around the west side of kink is the Counterdrain. But there is an intruiging oddity here. Three vertical concrete slabs stand in line running parallel to the Old Bedford River. One slab shows distinctly in the flooded pool and they can all be seen in photo below, with the horses.
Peter Cox Aug 2013, Olympus E-620

I came across the Gullet and those concrete slabs, or piers, by chance in 2012 whilst using Google Earth on my PC following the line of the Old Bedford River, during researches into the Ouse Washes. I was curious about the kink in the river, but much more so about the concrete piers.

The casual observer may wonder what the slabs are, or were, as I did, and why the bank goes round them.

In fact the loop and the slabs are unrelated, apart from location.

The loop pre-dates the slabs by more than three centuries and was a bank repair following a breach. The bank engineers of the mid-17th C found the land under the breach was porous, and built a new bank on firmer land to skirt around the porous area.

Darby (see note1) attributes the name to old dialect for a breach - "gull"- and says that there is reference to a Gull "neer Tubbes his howse" in the Bedford Level Corporation's accounts for 1655. Today there is a Tubbs Farm half a mile west of the Gullet, shown on the map above.

The slabs go back to 1969 and are concrete piers that once supported an elevated concrete "guideway" track planned to run between Earith and Sutton Gault on which a scientific marvel of the time, a magnetically powered and air levitated vehicle known as the "Hovertrain" would be tested at high speeds.

Luckily for inquisitive walkers, Cambridgeshire County Council erected an information board at the Gullet a few years ago which has some interesting, although not entirely accurate, information about the Hovertrain experiments, but strangely not about The Gullet itself.

The site of the board is also strange, being at ankle level to those on the footpath, and on a steep slope making closer inspection difficult, as my friend and fellow local historian Chris Holley demonstrates below. It is also furthest away and facing away from Sutton Gault from where most walkers approach. (Later update: since repositioned)
3 photos above: Peter Cox (aka Eddy) Aug 2013, Olympus E-620
I'm Peter Cox, although when I started my researches and this page in 2012 I did so under an online alias as many do.

I came across the Gullet and those concrete piers by chance in 2012 whilst using Google Earth on my PC following the line of the Old Bedford River, during researches into the Ouse Washes. I was curious about the kink in the river, but much more so about the concrete piers and "the Hovertrain Experiments".

I couldn't remember anything about that nor had friends or neighbours and wondered why a piece of Britain's recent history had apparently become forgotten.I soon discovered it certainly hadn't been.

To follow the story of those experiments please go to my dedicated page.