Wicken Fen, in Cambridgeshire, is one of Britain’s oldest protected landscapes, and one of only a handful of truly wild fens left in a region where nearly all the rest has long since been drained for farmland. Its wind pump, built in 1908 to drain nearby peat diggings and moved to its current spot in 1956, is the last surviving wooden wind pump in the Fens, still turning today, though these days it works in reverse, pumping water up into the reserve to keep the ancient reed beds wet rather than draining them dry.

Mid-May offers only a short window of true darkness, but a cold snap that week promised properly clear skies, so I headed out to spend the whole night with the pump as my one and only subject. Being out there alone, with nothing but an endless chorus of birds for company, had a particular kind of thrill to it, that sense of being somewhere ancient and completely undisturbed while the rest of the world sleeps.

Sticking to a single composition all night gave me the time to attempt something I don’t often manage, a full Milky Way arch panorama, stitched from the horizon on one side, up and over, down to the horizon on the other. It’s a slow, deliberate process, frame after frame, and not something you can rush. As the hours wore on toward dawn, mist began creeping in low across the fen, gentle at first, then thickening, folding the wind pump into a soft, ghostly haze just as the first light of the coming day started to show. A quiet, patient night, in a landscape that’s been standing still, in its own way, for well over a century.