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

century in the discovery of steam as an even more efficient pumping force than windmills. In 1692 Sir Thomas Fleetwood set out to drain Martin Mere in Lancashire, employing 2,000 men.³⁵ In 1755 storms destroyed the floodgates he had built, and renewed efforts to conquer the mere in the 1780s were crowned with permanent success only as a result of the use of steam power in the following century.

      Meanwhile, a less visible, but no less powerful, strategy for combating the waters was being devised. Every farmer knows that engineers may lower the levels of rivers for all they are worth, but that, without a follow-up operation of underdrainage in each saturated field, the real rewards for agriculture will never be harvested.³⁶ Open ditches and such ancient techniques as ridge and furrow are of limited effect.

      Upstream from Leamington Spa, the river Leam flows lazily among water-lilies and tall bulrushes. Scraps of sedge and meadow rue still cling to its margins, the last remnants of a marsh which must once have inundated the whole valley floor. It was here, in 1764, that a Warwickshire gentleman made a discovery of the greatest significance. Mr Joseph Elkington of Princethorpe was faced with a problem. His sheep were suffering from foot-rot, and however many ditches he dug, he could not get the water off his fields. He was pondering his dilemma when a servant stopped by with an iron bar for making sheep hurdles. Mr Elkington rammed it into the bottom of one of his ineffective ditches and, to his astonishment, water burst up like a geyser. He had discovered a method of intercepting springs, and, using stone to seal his drains, he and others like him set about spreading the gospel of effective underdrainage.³⁷ Very soon farmers were using clay tiles, which, stamped with the word ‘drain’, were exempted in 1826 from the tax on other clay products. The clay tile and its descendant, the plastic pipe, were to take their place alongside the plough and the axe as among the major agents in the settlement of England.

      EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ‘IMPROVEMENTS’

      In 1795 Parliament voted that King George III award Elkington £1,000 to carry out a survey of his achievements. It was in the reign of ‘Farmer George’ that drainage became more than ever in vogue, ‘improvement’ being all the rage. In the eighteenth century this word had two meanings, basically different faces of the same coin. ‘Capability Brown’, and later Repton were employed to ‘improve’ the beauties of the grounds around country houses. It seems curious that for all those hard-riding, hard-drinking squires, the eternal search for a status symbol should have taken the form of building temples to nymphs and dryads. Nonetheless, the universality of this practice is attested by one wit who told Brown that he would like to die before him, so that he could have a look at heaven before Brown ‘improved’ it. The other meaning of the word, still current in farming circles, is to intensify agricultural production. This form of improvement no doubt helped to pay the fees of Brown and Repton, along with all the other bills. Invoking a doctrine of the ‘spirit of place’, they felled ancient woodlands and drained the marshes. Villages were razed to the ground, so that they did not disrupt the view from drawing-room windows, with the same enthusiasm with which the peasantry on the more distant corners of the estate were dispossessed of their wetland commons in the pursuit of productive farming.

      The environmental contradictions implicit in all this activity scarcely occurred to anyone, of course. Sir Joseph Banks, the greatest naturalist of the age, founder of Kew Gardens and botanist-companion to Captain Cook, first developed his boyhood passion for natural history in East, West, and Wildmoor fens, which washed up to the foot of the Lincolnshire wolds, and so to the very gates of Revesby Abbey, the Banks’s family home. In his old age, Banks presided over the destruction of these fens, supporting the drainage projects of John Rennie, according to the Farmer’s Magazine of February 1807, against ‘a party of uninformed people, headed by a little parson and a magistrate’.³⁸ His portrait hangs in the place of honour in the Boston office of the Anglian Water Authority.

      Another botanist, William Roscoe, founder of Liverpool botanic gardens and commemorated by the genus Roscoea beloved of alpine gardeners, actually bankrupted himself as a result of a drainage scheme.³⁹ In 1793 Roscoe began work on Trafford Moss, part of the mighty Chat Moss, 2,500 acres of sphagnum, sundew, and bog asphodel. Roscoe’s ambition was to drain the whole wetland, and to this end he organized ditching, marling, and importation from nearby Manchester of boatload upon boatload of human ordure, which was forked by hand on to the moss. One of Roscoe’s ideas was a windmill plough, whose sails would actually churn up the bog. Unsurprisingly, in view of such projects, he was financially ruined, and his interest in Chat Moss was bought out by 1821.

      No one was worse at making connections about the consequences of his actions than William Madocks who reclaimed the coastal marshes of the Traeth Mawr in North Wales.⁴⁰ His embankment across the Glaslyn estuary was completed in 1811 amidst much rejoicing and ox-roasting, only to collapse the following year. After its final reconstruction, it was to bear the main road and railway out of Portmadoc, named in honour of its founder, who, with sublime inconsistency, passionately espoused the fashionable ideals of picturesque landscape. The man who rammed a causeway across the front of the finest prospect of Snowdonia was actually given to carving breathless verses to the water sprites on the river cliffs at Dolgellau. As he imposed his geometrical grid of drainage ditches across the newly filled-in estuary of the Traeth, it occurred to Madocks for a brief, but anxious, moment that the whole project resembled ‘Dutch gardening’; but in no time the poet Shelley arrived to help him with his endeavours, declaiming on the ‘poetry of engineering’. Only one man could see the situation clearly: Thomas Love Peacock, who described the scenic effect of Madocks’s project in his novel Headlong Hall: ‘The mountain frame remains unchanged, unchangeable: but the liquid mirror it enclosed is gone.’⁴¹

      ENCLOSURE IN THE NAPOLEONIC ERA

      What it felt like to be on the receiving end of such operations and the hammering that the landscape endured in those early years of the nineteenth century are painfully conveyed by another poet whose roots were in the East Midlands. By the Napoleonic era, when the war with France intensified the need for food, enclosure of common land by Act of Parliament began to replace enclosure by agreement. In 1809 an Act was passed for the enclosing of the parishes of Maxey and Helpston in Northamptonshire. One aspect of the landscape revolution that this entailed appears to have been major drainage works, which drastically modified the stream between the two villages, to create what is now known as the Maxey Cut. John Clare, in his poem ‘Remembrances’, describes the damage done to his parish by the axe of ‘spoiler and self-interest’:

      O I never call to mind

      Those pleasant names of places but I leave a sigh behind

      While I see the little mouldiwarps hang sweeing to the wind

      On the only aged willow that in all the field remains.

      The ‘mouldiwarps’, or moles, are the bane of drainage men, since their tunnels play havoc with banks and channels; and even now, water authorities employ mole-catchers. Clare continues:

      Inclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain

      It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill

      And hung the moles for traitors—though the brook is running still

      It runs a naked stream and chill.⁴²

      The solitary willow, the gutted brook: these were the things that Clare picked out as the climax of his catalogue of casualties in this, one of his finest poems. How absolutely it chimes with our modern experience of loss of a sense of place. In the mid-1980s, drainage contractors in the Midlands are still moving in on river valleys, starting with the stream itself and then clearing every adjacent hedge and copse as part of the same contract. The only differences Clare would notice are that machines have replaced axes, and that the moles are now gibbeted on barbed-wire fencing.

      Clare’s contemporaries in the wetlands had reason to be concerned more for their own survival than that of moles and willow trees. In 1812 James Loch took over as Lord Stafford’s agent at Trentham in Staffordshire. He was later to become notorious as the scourge of Sutherland for his role in the