Cow Fen location?

[Brian]

I have a birth certificate with the informant (mother) living at Cow Fen.  The birth was registered in the district of Cambridge St Mary the less.  Can anyone help me to locate Cow Fen please?

[trystan]

Brian,

I'm not from down there but a search on Google suggests that "Cow Fen" is in Swavesey.

On Google: (I put quotes around the search so I didn't find lots of cow refererences!)  
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22cow+fen%22&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&start=0&sa=N

Then a search for Swavesey brings up lots of useful sites:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=swavesey&btnG=Google+Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB

One of those sites which particularly caught my attention was on the Swavesey Roll of Honour for the Great War by Phil Curme:
http://www.curme.co.uk/

The map of Swavesey can be found here:
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=536353&y=268603&z=3&sv=536353,268603&st=4&mapp=newmap.srf&searchp=newsearch.srf&dn=883
If you zoom in on the map you can see a "Cow Fen Road" coming off Market Street (to the North East)



The Swavesey Meridian Website:
http://www.swaveseymeridian.co.uk/

Presumably somebody nearer to there can tell you a lot more about it.

Regards,
Trystan  

[Brian]

Many thanks Trystan,  I must have had a mental blackout when I googled - genealogical overload!

[Brian]

Although there is a Cow Fen in Swavesey I was not sure that the entry in the register would then show Swavesey rather than Cow Fen.  It has been suggested that Cow Fen is in fact Coe Fen
"That's still there - it's the marshy area
just up river from Launder's Green. Fen Causeway goes through the middle
of it. It's quite close to St Mary the Less. You wouldn't live in it, of
course, but perhaps there were houses round the edge."
This seems much more probable as it is in the Parish of St Mary the Less.

[RootsChat]

That's really interesting - I noticed there were come other "Fen"s in the area too - I don't what the work means.

Could it also possibly be a name of a farm?

[Brian]

Trystan
If you mean that you do not know what a Fen is it's an area of land that is regularly flooded.  Large number of these in Cambridgeshire and West Norfolk which were drained and used as farming land.  Coe Fen is behind the Fitzwilliam Museum and Peterhouse - its an area which leads down to the river hence is/was often flooded.  Interestingly access is via Granta Street in Cambridge which is where many of the people in the 1881 Census were laundresses and presumably worked for the Colleges and hung the washing in the Fen perhaps!

[AbbsONS]

From someone who was born in Cambridge.  

Coe Fen and the area nearby still floods when the river Cam is high.  The area is also near Newnham and Sheeps Green.