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

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.²

      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.³ 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’.⁴

      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’.⁵ 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.’⁶ (‘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’.⁷ 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’.⁸

      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.⁹ 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’.¹⁰

      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’.¹¹ 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’.¹² 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.¹³ 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’.¹⁴ 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.’¹⁵ ‘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;¹⁶ 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,