Like so many towns and villages in East Anglia, the character of Whittlesey has now been changed by new housing and commuters. Sixty years ago, though, it was a remote and compact village, and one of the few places on earth where I did not have to spell my surname when asked for it. From the town’s mayor to the local shopkeepers, there were scores of Catlings in Whittlesey, and, in the 1840 census returns, people called Catling outnumbered all the other surnames in the town.
When, in the 1980s, I regularly visited Amsterdam in order to write guidebooks, I would routinely be addressed in Dutch while others ahead of me in the shop, bar, or hotel would be greeted in English – it was assumed that I was Dutch on the basis of my appearance, and I often saw people who looked like my brothers on the streets of the Netherlands.
From these apparently random facts I constructed a romantic backstory for my family’s ancestry: clearly, I was descended from Frisian warriors who had crossed the North Sea 1,500 years ago and settled in East Anglia.
Excavating Orkney and Shetland