Taming the Flood: Rivers, Wetlands and the Centuries-Old Battle Against Flooding

Among the casualties wholly or partly attributable to drainage were 97 per cent of herb-rich hay meadows, 50 per cent of lowland fens, and 60 per cent of lowland raised mires, all lost in the space of a generation. In the mid-1980s the Norfolk Broads were losing an average of 1,500 acres per year.

All this has happened because enormous sums of public money available for drainage schemes since the Second World War have combined with a revolution in technology with which we have not yet fully come to terms. I will always remember standing one early spring day near the river Severn, arguing with a drainage officer who had previously maintained watercourses, which were now due to be reshaped as part of an expensive new scheme. This man had as little sympathy for the environment as a pike might have kind feelings towards a minnow. Yet the point he rightly argued was that, for the previous thirty years, he had personally controlled the maintenance of the ditches and hedges of this parish, so why should he now consider newfangled ideas about nature conservation? I looked at what he had created. In spite of his indifference, it was exquisite: the ditch banks were creamy with cowslips and lilac with cuckoo flower. Chiffchaffs were arriving to nest in the spangled scrub of blackthorn. There was a badger sett under some old pear trees. I asked him how he managed the place. It turned out that he had a small dredger, an even smaller budget, and a very primitive brand of mowing machine. With this equipment he had efficiently kept water flowing through his ditches. I lost the argument that day. Within a week the big machines had moved in, and that corner of his parish could have been one of thousands of others in modern England – any place, anywhere.

The lesson was clear. Of course, the countryside must continue to be a working landscape; but if most people’s definition of a river as something more than just a drain is valid, then that broad definition must be consciously built into the brief of those who wield this mighty technology of the JCB, the Hymac, and the Swamp-dozer. Only then can we guide the evolution of the countryside within legitimately broad terms of reference and continue the age-old process of civilizing the rivers. And why not? The big machines are only powered by the ratepayers’ money, and the woman who threatened to tie herself to a willow tree represents thousands of ratepayers who share her (and Constable’s) convictions about the essential nature of a river.

Over the last half-dozen years there has been a quiet revolution in the water industry as this simple realization has dawned upon engineers, farmers, digger-drivers, and even the legislators in Westminster. Of course, there are still places where the old-style canalizing approach to river management is being pushed through; and the conflict of values that underlies this whole issue raises a number of questions which are not easy to answer. No-one can seriously suggest that we turn back the clock entirely and return to the world of Constable’s hay wain, where there was a good deal of misery and hunger amidst all that beauty. We admire and cherish an environment that we also depend on for food. We may reduce the dredging of rivers, but if we stop it altogether, floods will return to overwhelm us. We are therefore committed to continue managing rivers, as we are to managing every square mile of the English countryside. It is the way we do so which counts.

THREE STAGES IN THE DESTRUCTION OF A RIVER

Before work began.

The machines move in.

The disastrous results of traditional river engineering.

The fact that rivers are such a symbol of endurance and of changeless change is what makes their management a touchstone for the whole issue of our relationship with the natural world. It is therefore a moving thought that the river managers were among the first people in the modern countryside business to stop and think a little harder about what they were actually doing. To adapt the slogan ‘Put the Great back in Britain’, some of them have begun to put the river back into river management. It remains to be seen whether at this eleventh hour for the English countryside, those other giants, the forestry and the agriculture industries, are also prepared to take seriously a wider frame of reference. If they are, we will at last be able to see the countryside put back into countryside management. Such an achievement depends upon two things for which the English have always had a special genius: a sense of place and a sense of compromise. What river engineers have begun to do is to rediscover their roots, and these, as we shall see, go back a very long way.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_3ab0568a-1315-50db-90ea-930f36bb9996)

THE FEAR OF THE FLOOD (#ulink_3ab0568a-1315-50db-90ea-930f36bb9996)

Traditional Attitudes to Wetlands

In the beginning, the waters covered the earth. The first thing you would notice about the landscape if you were to travel back in time was how wet it was. In prehistoric times rivers and streams ran unbridled over their flood plains, and most low ground consisted of marshes, fens, and very wet woodland. Well into modern times the major wetlands of England remained undrained: the Vale of York, the fens around the Humber, the Essex marshes, the Lancashire mosses, Romney Marsh, the Severn lowlands, the Somerset Levels, and, above all, the ‘Great Level’ of the Fens. Surveying these now prosaically productive acres of beet and potato, it is as hard to imagine their undrained state as if one were trying to conjure up some fabulous landscape lost beyond recall. Charles Kingsley, writing of the final destruction of the Fens, was perhaps the first to regret the loss of what must have been one of the finest natural systems in Europe. He describes immense tracts of pale reed and dark-green alder stretching from Cambridge to Peterborough, from King’s Lynn to the foot of the Lincolnshire wolds, where:

high overhead hung, motionless, hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as far as eye could see. Far off, upon the silver mere, would rise a puff of smoke from a punt, invisible from its flatness and its white paint. Then down the wind came the boom of the great stanchion-gun; and after that sound another sound, louder as it neared; a cry as of all the bells of Cambridge, and all the hounds of Cottesmore; and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of terrified wild-fowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the air with the hoarse rattle of their wings, while clear above all sounded the wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of the great wild swan.

They are all gone now … Ah, well, at least we shall have wheat and mutton instead, and no more typhus and ague; and, it is to be hoped, no more brandy-drinking and opium-eating; and children will live and not die.

Major wetlands present in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

There speaks the nineteenth century: all gone, but in a good cause. It is only our more ambivalent age, engaged in the very last mopping-up of the great wet waste that challenged our ancestors, which has begun to question whether the price of progress has been too high. We can see more clearly now that the ultimate end of such a process – the flood entirely tamed – is both impossible and undesirable. The long, and still unfolding, history of land drainage contains much that is progress in the best sense: the combating of diseases and terrifying floods and the production of food to sustain a growing population. But it is also a saga of human avarice and the abuse of power.

Quite apart from the major wetlands, every valley bottom below a certain contour line must have been soggy and at times impassable. Quite how wet any particular locality once was can often be guessed through detective work involving an enjoyable study of plants, place-names, and local history. At Henley-in-Arden in Warwickshire, two churches face each other across the little river Alne. Their presence is explained in an appeal of 1548 to retain both churches: ‘The town of Henley is severed from the Parish Church with a brook which in winter so riseth that none may pass over it without danger of perishing.’ Nearby, in the tell-tale peat, are stands of meadowsweet and sedge, the last remnants of Henley’s ancient marsh, now happily salvaged as an oasis within a new housing estate.

In other places, canals have provided a damp lifeline for plants surviving from much earlier wetlands. In the 1950s the redoubtable Eva Crackles, a Yorkshire teacher, was gathering grasses at the point where the Leven canal crosses the site of an ancient lake, now long vanished, but clearly just surviving when the canal was cut in 1802. There, just at the point where canal and lake site coincide, she found one of the few recorded colonies of the narrow small reed, tenaciously clinging to the mud. Newport in Shropshire was ‘new’ in the twelfth century when it was granted a charter by Henry I, who required that it supply fish to the royal household from its medieval fish pond. This pond survived just long enough to be incorporated into the Shropshire Union Canal in 1833, complete with an unusual wealth of water plants, which earned the canal basin the status of Site of Special Scientific Interest in 1986. At Gailey in Staffordshire, an unusually rich flora emerged in gravel workings abandoned in the 1960s. These were relics from the fen from which the place took its name, the Anglo-Saxon ‘gagol leah’, the clearing in the gale, or bog myrtle, that aromatic wetland shrub which gives an extra tang to home-made gin.

Names on the map tell us a great deal about the ancient undrained landscape. The little village of Iwade commands the approaches to the Isle of Sheppey and the coastal marshes of the Swale. Its name means exactly what it says: ‘I wade’. Few place names are more telling on the Ordnance Survey map than the presence on the lowlands of the word ‘moor’. Examples include Morton or Moortown; Sedgemoor; Otmoor; Moorgate, the gate in London’s city wall which opened on to Moorfields. This was the marsh that William Dugdale, in his seventeenth-century classic on drainage, describes as a favourite resort of Londoners for skating.

The people of the Somerset Levels paid a tithe called ‘moor-penny’; their cattle suffered from a disease called ‘moor-evil’; and in every pond and damp corner you will still see the jerking movements of the moorhen. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its first meaning for ‘moor’ ‘uncultivated ground covered with heather’. To most of us, reared on Wuthering Heights, that is what a moor means. But to our ancestors, living when the hills were less thoroughly cleared and the lowlands were more universally wet, a moor was something more terrifying: a morass. The word ‘mor’ first occurs in Saxon accounts of King Alfred hiding in his wetland fastness in Somerset, and most evocatively of all in our national epic poem ‘Beowulf’. The hero, Beowulf, does battle with Grendel and Grendel’s mother, two enormous monsters which haunt the swamps – ‘moras’ in Anglo-Saxon – from which they emerge to wreak havoc before returning to a mere in the very heart of the fen: ‘The lake which they inhabit lies not many miles from here, overhung with groves of rime-crusted trees whose thick roots darken the water.’

Moorhen.

HOSTILE WETLANDS

This description, at the very beginning of our literature, sets the tone for accounts of wetlands, which through the ages have had a consistently bad press. When in the eighth century the Saxon saint Guthlac penetrated the heart of the Fens to found Crowland Abbey, he was described by the monk Felix of Crowland as encountering demons in the wilderness, which ‘came with such immoderate noises and immense horror, that it seemed to him that all between heaven and earth resounded with their dreadful cries’. They bound Guthlac ‘in all his limbs … and brought him to the black fen, and threw and sank him in the muddy waters’.

With the passage of time, demons are about the only form of unpleasantness not recorded in accounts of the wetlands. William Lambarde, Elizabeth I’s archivist, described Romney Marsh in 1576 as ‘evil in winter, grievous in summer and never good’.

In 1629 the Fens were vilified thus: ‘The Air nebulous, grosse and full of rotten harres; the water putred and muddy, yea full of loathsome vermine; the earth spuing, unfast and boggie.’

(‘Harres’ were noxious gases.) Samuel Pepys, visiting his relations at Wisbech thirty-five years later, was equally unimpressed as he passed through ‘most sad fennes, all the way observing the sad life which the people of the place – which if they were born there, they do call the Breedlings of the place – do live, sometimes rowing from one spot to another and then wadeing’.

For travellers such places provided a multitude of hazards. At best they involved a detour. At worst there was the danger – horror of horrors! – of falling in. The intrepid traveller Celia Fiennes had a near miss when her horse was almost sucked into a dyke near Ely in 1698; and in the same year she took care to avoid Martin Mere in Lancashire, ‘that as the proverb sayes has parted many a man and his mare indeed’.

The fate awaiting someone pitched from a horse in such a place might be blood-poisoning, ‘being dreadfully venom’d by rolling in slake’, as William Hall put it in his nineteenth-century fen doggerel.

Worse still, one might be swallowed for ever in the morass. Daniel Defoe wrote of Chat Moss, near Manchester, as ‘being too terrible to contemplate for it will bear neither man nor beast’.

To outsiders, wetlands appeared hostile fastnesses, associated only with floods and disease.

Getting lost was another likelihood, unless, as at Longdon Marsh in Worcestershire, the traveller was able to pay a guide to show the way across. On the swampy willow scrub of the Wealdmoors in Shropshire, the local rector described in 1673 how ‘the inhabitants commonly hang’d bells about the necks of their cows that they might the more easily find them’.

Otmoor was notorious as a place in which to get lost, and verses celebrate how the curfew rung on winter nights from Charlton church guided travellers out of the intractable moor. Fog, the one element which no drainer can ever quite banish from the marshes, still rolls out over Otmoor. A farmer’s wife giving evidence at the Otmoor M40 inquiry in 1983 described how she had once become completely lost in one of her own fields while counting sheep. Daniel Defoe describes the Fens shrouded in fog, through which nothing could be seen ‘but now and then the lanthorn or cupola of Ely Minster’.

To further terrify lost, wandering travellers, igniting marsh gas created the alarming phenomena, still not fully understood by scientists, known as will-o’-the-wisps, jack-o’-lanterns, or corpse-candles.

Perhaps the gloomiest wetland in literature is the Slough of Despond in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in which the protagonist Christian sinks under the weight of his sins. Bunyan was a tinker’s son from Bedford and he is thought to have been inspired by ‘Soul’s Slough’ near Tempsford where the Rivers Ivel and Ouse often must have bogged down travellers on the Great North Road. The flooded meadows can still be seen from the A1 trunk road in winter but sadly, as yet, there is no Slough of Despond Site of Special Scientific Interest.

‘Infect her beauty,/ You fen-sucked fogs,’ inveighed Shakespeare’s King Lear against his daughter. Our ancestors associated wetlands with disease. They had good reason. As late as 1827, travellers were ‘fearful of entering the fens of Cambridgeshire lest the Marsh Miasma should shorten their lives’.

On the Somerset Levels, inundated by heavy floods in 1872 and 1873, a report described how ‘Ague set in early in the spring and is now very prevalent … among the poorer families who are badly fed and clothed.’

‘Ague’ was malaria, meaning literally ‘bad air’, the marshy miasma which, until the discovery of the malarial mosquito in 1880, was believed to be the main cause of the disease. Mosquitoes that carry malaria breed far north into Europe and were responsible for many deaths. Malaria was endemic in the English wetlands. ‘As bad as an Essex Ague’ was a common expression;

and in the 1870s the garrison at Tilbury Fort was changed every six months because of the prevalence of malaria. The Thames marshes ensured that the ague was carried into the courts of kings, who were less resistant to it than the hardy people of the fen. James I was declared by his contemporaries to have died of it, and his victim Sir Walter Raleigh, awaiting execution in the Tower, prayed that he would not be seized by a fit of ague on the scaffold, lest his enemies should proclaim that he had met his death shivering with fear.

The terror, if not the actuality, of the disease has survived into our own time. In the early 1970s Strood District Council was spraying the dykes in the North Kent Marshes with DDT as a precaution against malaria. Malaria is caused by parasites transmitted from an infected person to another person in the saliva of a mosquito’s bite. Therefore, if there are no people with malaria from whom it can be transmitted in a given area, the disease dies out, as it did eventually in England. For the same reason, the commonly voiced concern that modern wetland creation schemes may bring back malaria can be discounted in the UK.

As towns grew larger, they began to pollute the adjacent marshes and valley bottoms, which in turn developed ominous reputations for disease. Bubonic plague is not directly associated with water, but the rats which carried it arrived by boat at riverside wharves. The Great Plague of London is said to have broken out in 1665 in a marshy district known as the Seven Dials, and it was especially prevalent along the old river Fleet. In the nineteenth century the stagnant waters of cities were haunted by the shadow of cholera. It is no accident that many slums were built on marshes: Mosside in Manchester, the Bogside in Londonderry, and much of the East End of London, where the suffix ‘ey’ to many of the place-names tells us that they were islands in Saxon times: Hackney, Stepney, and, most notorious of all, Bermondsey, where, in the 1850s, the river Neckinger, ‘the colour of strong green tea’, flowed round Jacob’s Island, which was used by Dickens as a setting for Oliver Twist, and was described by him as ‘the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London’. Social reformers were not slow to describe the horrors of such places. Friedrich Engels singled out the river Aire in Leeds and the Irk in Manchester for special mention: ‘In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depth of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable.’

A hundred years later George Orwell described the stagnant pools of the Ince flashes at Wigan as ‘covered with ice the colour of raw umber … nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water.’

Add to this the limitations that wetlands impose on farming – short grazing seasons, foot-rot in sheep, suppression of root growth in the damp soil, and the hazards of high water for cereal crops, not to mention the terror of a flood – and it is enough to make one want to rush out and drain all remaining wetlands on sight. Certainly, it is easy to understand why drainage was regarded as a major manifestation of progress. But there is another side to the story. It is a curious fact that the poor benighted people who were unfortunate enough to live in the rural wetlands did not seem to share the prejudices of their visitors at all. Celia Fiennes, in high disgust at finding ‘froggs and slow-worms and snailes in my roome’ when lodging in Ely, had the honesty to qualify her personal dislike for the place, which ‘must needs be very unhealthy, tho’ the natives say much to the contrary which proceeds from custom and use’.

THE HARVESTS OF THE WETLANDS

It really was exasperating to observe how the natives seemed to like their marshes. William Elstobb found the eighteenth-century fen dwellers content with ‘uncomfortable accommodations’;

and Vancouver wrote of Burwell in 1794: ‘Any attempt in contemplation for the better drainage of this fen is considered hostile to the true interests of these deluded people.’

Back in 1646, one of the few articulate defenders of such deluded people maintained that those who would undertake drainage ‘have always vilified the Fens, and have misinformed many Parliament men, that all the Fens is a mere quagmire … of little or no value: but those which live in the Fens, and are neighbours to it, know the contrary.’ The anonymous author of The Anti-Projector proceeded to list the bounty of the fen. There were horses, cattle, fodder, sheep, osiers, and reed; and ‘Lastly, we have many thousand cottagers, which live on our Fens, which must otherwise go a-begging.’

Such people knew how to make the watery wilderness yield up its riches. Pre-eminent among the benefits was summer grazing. The very word ‘Somerset’ (Sumorsaetan) is Anglo-Saxon, possibly meaning ‘summer dwellers’, those who came down to graze the levels in summer-time. It is thought that those who occupied the Malvern hill forts may have herded their cattle down the Worcestershire drove-ways to pasture them on Longdon Marsh in the summers before the Roman conquest. Shortage of grass in high summer was a continual problem in the open-field system of the Middle Ages. No such lack of lush pasture afflicted the Fens, especially in the silt belt, where medieval prosperity is commemorated by mighty churches and confirmed by historians’ research into medieval and sixteenth-century tax returns. It was the flood itself that often ensured the rich grazing. The commons of the Isle of Axholme lay under water from around Martinmas (11 November) until May Day. As the inhabitants were to inform the people who set out to drain these wetlands in the seventeenth century, this flood brought with it ‘a thick fatt water’. After drainage had removed this regular winter flood, the people were left with ‘thin hungry starving water’, which rendered the land incapable of supporting the large grazing herds which it had formerly sustained.

Even now, local farmers around Axholme regard the ‘warped land’ which was deliberately flooded with silt as the best land in the region.

The inhabitants of the wetlands depended upon them for their survival. Economic resources of the Fens – pasture, wildfowl, and domestic geese – are here illustrated on the village sign of Cowbit in Lincolnshire.