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

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.^fn12

      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

       THE FEAR OF THE FLOOD

       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.¹

      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