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

our own wetlands must have been like. The Marais Communal of Curzon lies in the lap of low scrubby hills, like a green sea of stillness. It is quite without the trees or hedges which enclose all the country around it. Cattle, herded down to it along drove-ways used from time immemorial, slowly graze across its moist levels. From the steady centre of this tranquillity flickers the occasional silver of snipe or redshank, like fish rising from the still heart of a pool. The real beauty of such places is not their actual visual components, but the system that underlies them: the harmony between the people and the nature they represent.

      Andrew Motion’s poem ‘Inland’ describes how a society, as much as an ecology, was overturned by drainage projects in the seventeenth-century fens. In this extract, a fen villager watches the arrival by boat of the men who are going to change his life:

      Sun flicked round the bay,

      binding the outline of farms

      to their reflections in grey

      bands of light. The marsh

      always survives. Always.

      Cattle stirred in their shed,

      uncoiling sweet whisps

      of breath over my head;

      fresh shadows spilt down

      their flanks and spread

      across water to flake

      into shrinking fragments

      over the strangers’ wake.

      Their boat put down

      some men; one staked

      its prow into our land,

      waded towards us

      over the grass, and

      lifted one arm. Our world

      dried on his hand.⁴⁷

      That world was one of many fen villagers co-operating in order to survive. In the battle to save West Sedgemoor and the Derwent Ings in the 1970s and 1980s, the large number of small landowners was to militate against the efficiency with which large-scale drainage schemes could be organized. In 1794 Billingsley described the Somerset Levels as ‘destitute of gentlemen’s houses’;⁴⁸ and the 1580 muster returns for Holland in Lincolnshire lamented ‘the want of gentlemen here to inhabit’.⁴⁹ Charlton-on-Otmoor means ‘town of the churls’. A ‘churl’ was a free peasant (note the slur implied by present dictionary usage), and Charlton never had a resident squire, being dismissed in eighteenth-century diocesan returns as having ‘no family of note’.⁵⁰ The people of Charlton must have cherished their independence, especially when they looked at the fate of the neighbouring village of Noke, which, it was said, was lost in a game of cards by Lily, duchess of Marlborough.

      Reports on current or just completed land-drainage schemes emphasize the trend whereby large farmers accrue the benefit much more commonly than small holders. The theory behind such schemes is that ambitious large farmers will set an example, which will encourage their small backward neighbours. The latter are described in all current cost-benefit reports of the Ministry of Agriculture as ‘laggards’. The assumptions behind this unfortunate word go back a long way. In 1652 Dugdale described fenmen as a ‘lazy and beggarly people’. Billingsley castigated the farmers of the Somerset Levels in the late eighteenth century thus:

      The possession of a cow or two, with a hog and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant in his own conception, above his brethren in the same rank of society … In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence … and at length the sale of a half-fed cow or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.⁵¹

      No doubt such people must have seemed slow-witted. In order to counteract the effects of malaria, they were frequently doped with opium, which was sold over the counter in the village shop or grown in the fens (where Poppy Hill and Poppy Farm still exist as place-names). Where cannabis was grown as an important fibre crop in the Cambridgeshire fens, the workers in the hemp fields were known to become exceedingly drowsy. Moreover, the isolation of the people of the wetlands led to inbreeding. In 1870 the geologist de Rance commented on the number of idiots in the Lancashire Fylde, which resulted from ‘the dislike of the people to marry outside the district’.⁵²

      The laggards were constantly encouraged to improve for their own good. Arthur Young, as usual, has the last word. Here he describes the wetlands of Lincolnshire: ‘Fens of water, mud, wildfowl, frogs and agues have been converted to rich pasture and arable worth from 20 shillings to 40 shillings an acre: health improved, morals corrected and the community enriched’.⁵³

      The history of drainage since the sixteenth century has seen the decline of enforced co-operation in sharing a resource, in the face of individual private enterprise. The big farmer has got bigger, and the small farmer smaller. This thought brings us bang up to date. The great agricultural revolution of our own times, in which drainage has played no small part, has accelerated the decline of the small farmer just as surely as it has imperilled the ecological system previously sustained by communal wetland management; and it has begun to destroy the basic resources of the land, as ever deeper drainage has created mineral problems in the soil, wastage of peat, and an increasing dependence upon pumping. Attempts to tame the flood have not always progressed smoothly. There have been frequent and major setbacks; and it may be that we are now on the threshold of a new era, in which, for the first time, leaders in society will make a conscious decision to allow the flood-waters in some areas to rise again.

      With all the themes previously outlined in mind, it is time to make a brief chronological survey of that process, which began in the mists of time, and has made inevitable the problems and conflicts described in the remaining chapters of this book. We are witnessing only the latest episode in that long history, in which geography itself has been remade, and the landscape, now more than ever, is transformed not so much by the efforts of individuals, as by public policy and the stroke of a pen.

       CHAPTER 3

       THE WINNING OF THE WATERS

       A History of the Fight against Flooding until the Post-War Era

      Today, land-drainage operations are administered from tower blocks, with the aid of computers in the office and sophisticated machinery on the river bank. It all seems a peculiarly modern phenomenon. In fact, the technocrats of land drainage are heirs to one of the oldest forms of organized local government. In 1252 the ‘jurats’ of Romney Marsh are recorded as having had the power to repair the sea wall and to control the ditches ‘from time out of mind’.¹ Similarly, organized bodies of people walked the marshes of the Thames, setting out in the early morning mist to assess the repairs required, which were paid for by a charge known as ‘wallscot’ or ‘scottage’. Those who escaped these earliest of water-rates could be deemed to have got off ‘scot free’. In the Domesday Book, our first named drainage specialist makes his appearance. He lived on the Somerset Levels, and was called Girard Fossarius, Gerard of the Drain.

      The people of the Middle Ages inherited sea walls and drainage channels which had survived from the Roman occupation. The Romans had gained expertise in flood alleviation and in irrigation projects from the Greeks and the Etruscans before them. They industriously developed these skills throughout Europe, and were quick to export them to their colonies.² The emperor Hadrian is commemorated in Britain not only by the engineering achievement of his famous wall, but also by the Car dyke, a catch-water drain encircling the western edge of the Fens, linking the river Cam at Waterbeach with the Witham near Lincoln.³ On the Medway estuary in Kent, raised banks built by the Romans to keep out the sea lasted substantially until the eighteenth century,⁴ and the extent of Roman reclamation appears to have been formidable. The military