In the Fen Country is the earliest orchestral work that Vaughan Williams sanctioned for publication. There were at least two other orchestral compositions that preceded it—Bucolic Suite and The Solent—but the composer suppressed them and they have never been performed. As he did with most of his large compositions, Vaughan Williams revised In the Fen Country several times after its original 1904 version, making his last emendations in 1935. While the work is folk-like in character, it contains no thematic quotations from folk sources. It should be mentioned that the Fens are a marshy region in eastern England.

In the Fen Country opens with a somber, slightly mournful theme on English horn. Its pastoral manner divulges the composer's natural feel for the folk idiom, developed when he began collecting folk songs just two years earlier, in 1902. The music is quite atmospheric, redolent of rural and misty scenery, here and throughout in its gossamer, Impressionistic style and dark Romanticism: while Vaughan Williams' mature voice can be heard in the work, the whole sounds much like a mixture of Debussyian reserve and Rachmaninovian gloom. As the work progresses, the theme intensifies until a glorious but relatively subdued climax is reached, after which the melody appears in several imaginative variations before another climactic episode brings on the return of the theme in its subdued opening guise. The viola solo near the end is lovely and perhaps the most characteristic music of the mature style of Vaughan Williams than anything else in the work. In the end, this piece must be assessed as a successful minor composition from the young and still-developing composer.

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