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

were the marshes of the Wealdmoors, just north of Telford and Wellington in Shropshire, which Loch set about draining with a will. Loch’s reputation in Shropshire does not appear to have been so contentious as it was in Scotland, and the landscape he created in the Wealdmoors is now level ploughland of peat interspersed with rectangular plantations of poplar.

      In the Somerset Levels, the surviving nucleus of wetland commons was tackled between 1770 and 1800. The period opened with the usual resistance from the inhabitants, who dug an open grave for William Fairchild, the surveyor of King’s Sedgemoor, and announced ‘a reward of a hogshead of cider … to anyone who could catch him’.⁴³ Nevertheless, by 1800 a commoner was speaking with regret of the times when the undrained wastes had given him pasture, where ‘he could turn out his cow and pony, feed his flock of geese and keep his pig’.

      Moles, the bane of drainage men, gibbeted on a willow tree as described in John Clare’s poem ‘Remembrances’.

      The Somerset Levels. The dwellers of the Levels successfully resisted the kind of large-scale drainage which transformed eastern England in the seventeenth century.

      OTMOOR

      North-east of Oxford lies Otmoor, four square miles of damp land cradled in a basin of low hills and watered by the river Ray. It is ringed by villages known as the ‘seven towns’, which for centuries were sustained by the rights of common they enjoyed upon Otmoor’s lush pastures. In 1815 an Act for the enclosure of Otmoor was passed, at the instigation of Lord Abingdon and George, duke of Marlborough; and in 1829 the enclosure awards were complete.⁴⁴ Those smallholders who were not directly excluded by the awards lost their shares in the common indirectly, since they were unable to pay the prohibitive legal and fencing costs of securing their small allotments. In 1829 and 1830 the river Ray, which had been subjected to massive engineering works in order to drain the newly enclosed moor, began to flood the land beyond Otmoor. The farmers affected broke up the new flood-banks, and after being arrested initially, were released on the grounds that the enclosure commissioners had exceeded their powers in constructing the drainage works. This was the signal for the general discontent to erupt into action. The dispossessed commoners, invoking the battle-cry ‘Otmoor for Ever’, blackened their faces and went out on to the moor by night to destroy the commissioner’s works. On the night of 6 September 1830, more than 500 of them were out there breaking up bridges, hedges, and ditches. The yeomanry arrived and carted forty-four rioters off to Oxford gaol. By a fatal miscalculation, the guards had chosen the day of St Giles’ fair. An angry crowd attacked the troops, and rescued the prisoners, and their cattle were loosed again upon the common. Only in 1835, after intermittent rioting, subsequently suppressed by the Coldstream Guards, did the magistrates cautiously suggest that unrest had ended, ‘Otmoor, being now it may be hoped in a state of permanent tranquillity’. Vain hope. In the 1970s and 1980s, Otmoor has been the controversial subject of vigorous campaigns fought against both a motorway and an extensive drainage scheme for the river Ray proposed by the Thames Water Authority.

      Otmoor and its seven towns before enclosure.

      Otmoor after drainage and enclosure.

      George Stephenson’s ambitious but never realized plans to embank and reclaim the estuaries in Morecambe Bay.

      THE VICTORIAN AGE

      Nonetheless, the Otmoor riots mark the end of an era of open conflict on the wetlands. As the Victorian age got under way, ever more ingenious technologies aided the steady advance of drainage. The practice of ‘warping’, whereby tidal waters were made to flow back and deposit their rich silts over the land, was popular.⁴⁵ In 1839 John Rennie put forward proposals to reclaim the whole of the Wash, and to call the new land ‘Victoria County’. Similar megalomaniac schemes were proposed in the 1960s, but were never carried through. In 1837 George Stephenson, who had reason to detest the wetlands after his heroic battle to build a railway across Chat Moss, put forward an ambitious plan to reclaim the whole eastern side of Morecambe Bay by building a railway from Lancaster to Furness. His plan came to nothing, but successive railway engineers were to divert and canalize many miles of river as a by-product of their endeavours. On the credit side, as far as wetland habitat was concerned, where railways crossed valleys, they sometimes disrupted the drainage, creating small marshes which survive to this day. A similar mixed result had attended the efforts of earlier canal engineers. Thus James Brindley set out to drain Longdon Marsh in Worcestershire, and the duke of Bridgewater organized drainage of the northern part of Chat Moss as part of his canal building. More often, however, navigation engineers were at odds with drainage engineers, especially when they were working on existing rivers. To make most rivers navigable, the water level must be raised by building weirs; there is little doubt that the navigation structures built on the Leicestershire Soar in the 1770s worsened the local drainage, as did eighteenth-and nineteenth-century navigation works on the Thames and in Somerset.

      The great copper butterfly, now extinct through drainage, depended in its life cycle upon the water dock.

      In 1851, which, with symbolic appropriateness, was the year in which a hungry urban population exceeded for the first time the population of the countryside, drainage-minded landlords up from the shires were able to carry away a wealth of interesting ideas from the Great Exhibition. Pipe-tile-making machines were on show, as was a new centrifugal pump which ‘astonished the visitors’.⁴⁶ Within two years, Martin Mere, just south of the Fylde and Whittlesey Mere in the Fens, had been pumped dry.⁴⁷ By the late 1840s the English race of the great copper butterfly, which had retained its last stronghold around Whittlesey, had become extinct.⁴⁸ A symbol of the less controllable results of technology, the Holme Post, a cast-iron column believed by some to have come from the Crystal Palace, was sunk into the ground near Whittlesey, to measure peat shrinkage. Its replacement marker indicates a thirteen-foot drop between the present ground level and that of the mid-nineteenth century.

      Technology was to transform not only the actual level of the land, but also the fine details of the wetland landscapes. Extracts from the account book of the Derwent Ings reveal the subtle alterations which took place in the space of two generations:

1867–8	Oct. 17th	Leather for the Clow.
	Oct. 19th	Cheese and bread on Ings Breaking Day.
1887–8		Paid J Binns for moles catching £1. 18s. od.
1910–11		Taking one ton of cement to bridge.
1923		Half cwt barbed wire fifteen shillings.49

      William Morris. He challenged the Thames Conservancy over their felling of riverside willows. © National Portrait Gallery

      A ‘clow’