The Lost Fens E-Book

Ian D. Rotherham

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The loss of the great fenlands of eastern England is the greatest single removal of ecology in our history. So thorough was the process that most visitors to the regions, or even people living there, have little idea of what has gone. For many, the Fenlands are the vast expansive flatlands of intensive farming, the 'breadbaskets' of Britain. Lost are the vast flocks of wetland birds that filled the evening skies in winter, the frozen wetlands and the fen skaters of the winter, and the abundant black terns or breeding wading birds of the summer months. However, pause a while off main roads and consider place names and road names: Fenny Lane, The Withies, Commonside, Reed Holme, Fen Common, Turbary Lane, Wildmore, Adventurers' Fen, Wicken Fen, and more; they tell a story of a landscape now gone but once hugely important. The Fens bred revolution and civil war and paid the penalty. They nurtured religious non-conformism with global impact. After 1066, the Saxons withheld the Normans' onslaught, and in the 1970s, unting's Beavers took action against twentieth-century invaders. The fenscapes, neither water nor land but something in-between, breed independence and, if necessary, dissention. This story is of politically and economically driven ecological catastrophe and loss. So much has gone, but we do not even know fully what was there before. With global environmental change, and especially climate change, fenlands once again have major roles in our sustainable futures.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have supplied information and images for the book and others have simply encouraged the work. My wife Liz is thanked for her endless patience and my colleague Joan Butt produced many of the maps. The History Press and their editors are thanked for their encouragement and support. Acknowledgement is also given to the National Archives, ref. MPC1/56, for the use of the Inclesmoor Map.

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

1. Changing Perceptions of the Fens

2. The Fenlands of Eastern England

3. The Wildlife and Flora of the Ancient Fens

4. Draining and Improving the Fens: The Background to the Great Drainage

5. The Great Drainage Begins

6. The Progress of ‘Improvement’

7. Stripping the Flesh from the Bones: The Fenland Peat Cutters

8. Destruction and Rebirth: Fenlands from the Late Nineteenth Century Through the Twentieth Century

9. The Future Fens

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

FOREWORD

It is my great pleasure to write the Foreword for this book. Until I read it my knowledge of the Fens – both the Northern Fens of South Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire and the Southern Fens of south Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire – was bitty and incomplete. I had dipped into one book, carried in my head a short vivid description from a second book, and read a third book from cover to cover. Now, having read Ian Rotherham’s The Lost Fens, I feel that my fenland education is much more complete.

The book that I had dipped into was Jack Ravensdale’s Liable to Floods (1974), the history of three villages on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens between AD450 and 1850. The description that I carry around in my head is of the last royal deer hunt that took place in the Northern Fens in South Yorkshire in 1609. The description is by the antiquarian and diarist Abraham De La Pryme (1671–1704), and was quoted in the Revd Joseph Hunter’s South Yorkshire (Vol. 1, 1828, p. 156). The occasion was a visit to Hatfield Chase by Prince Henry, Prince of Wales. The royal party embarked in almost 100 boats, having frightened about 500 deer to take to the water. They pursued them into Thorne Mere ‘and there being up to their very necks in water, their horned heads raised seemed to represent a little wood’. Ian quotes the piece in full in Chapter 2.

On the subject of fenlands, a book that I have read from cover to cover is a very short book, of just sixty-seven pages: Eric Ennion’s Adventurers Fen, published in 1942. It contains a vivid account of this small fenland remnant over a period of forty years, from 1900 to 1940. During this time it changed from being a working fen (with litter cutting for coarse hay, turf cutting for domestic fuel, reed cutting for thatching, and osiers for making wicker baskets and eel traps), to being drained and farmed. It then reverted to nature during the Depression years of the 1930s and then, at the outbreak of the Second World War, it was lost to agriculture forever. As Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald says in his Foreword to Ennion’s book, it is a love story ‘the headstone over the grave of a part of Britain … where but a short while ago the bittern nested is sugar beet’.

This quotation says it all. Visitors to the former fenland regions today, and many of their residents, see a tamed landscape. They are quite unaware of what the Fens once looked like, how their resources were exploited for thousands of years, of the rich plant life and animal life that once abounded there, and how they were destroyed. All they see is a rich agricultural landscape, Britain’s ‘bread basket’, full of flat fields of wheat, sugar beet, potatoes and other vegetables that replaced around 2,500 square miles (4,000km2) of ancient fenland landscape in the Southern Fens of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and East Anglia, and 1,900 square miles (3,000km2) in the Northern Fens of South and East Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire. This book tries to set the record straight. It looks at the landscape and wildlife before drainage, the piecemeal and then highly organised drainage of the wetlands and the consequences of the land ‘improvement’, and then brings the story up to date in the context of twenty-first century environmental issues.

Ian has been called a ‘take-no-prisoners environmentalist’. He has campaigned hard and long for countryside management and environmental responsibility in his native South Yorkshire. Here he takes a much wider view and has written a compelling book about a subject that has been very close to his heart for many years. The book has everything. First, it covers both the major former fenland areas, not only the well-known Cambridgeshire Fens and their extension into south Lincolnshire but also the less well-known former fenland landscapes of South Yorkshire and neighbouring north Lincolnshire. Secondly, it covers a vast sweep of time from the very beginnings of fenland environments, through the 2,000 years of draining and ‘improvement’, to their virtual disappearance, and then on to current projects to stabilise remaining fenland remnants and reinstate others. There is also a telling chapter about the wildlife and lost flora of the un-drained Fens, and a fascinating chapter on the impact of peat extraction. Finally, having dealt with the attitudes of mind that led to the destruction of the ancient fenlands, there is a powerful last chapter about the future and about environmental sustainability in general. It is a story of great loss, of a great ecological catastrophe, but also a vision for the future, a vision for restoration.

His audience is very wide; it not only embraces the general reader, such as local historians and amateur naturalists, and specialists such as landscape historians and ecologists, but also planners, local politicians and national politicians – indeed, anyone who cares or should care about fenland environments and environmental concerns generally.

This is a powerful book with a number of powerful messages. It is timely and deserves to find a permanent place in the literature on the Fens.

Melvyn Jones,

Kirkstead Abbey Grange,

Thorpe Hesley, 2013

INTRODUCTION

About a quarter of the British Isles is, or has been, some kind of wetland.

Oliver Rackham (1986)

A LOST WORLD AND A FORGOTTEN LANDSCAPE

To stand inside the dykes and banks of the Wicken Sedge Fen is to take a step back in history. Suddenly you become Hereward the Wake, the last Saxon warlord, gazing out over an English kingdom squeezed in the grasp of Norman steel and a culture battered and broken. Our view today is across a largely barren, dry vista of intensive agri-industry; devoid of its ecology and deprived of its native peoples. Yet history tells us that this was once the richest landscape for people and for wildlife in Britain. Such an observation begs the questions of when and why it disappeared. What did it look like and exactly what was its ecology? These basic questions are hard to answer since there are few written records, and this Fen was mostly destroyed before anyone bothered to identify and catalogue its animals and plants. We know that much of the great wetland was still here in 1600, but was virtually annihilated by 1900. By whom and why did this happen?

Recent conservation work, at great expense, has begun the slow process of recovery of areas immediately around the handful of fen sites that remain. However, even here and with the largest conservation grants ever allocated by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the recovery is habitat re-creation not restoration. The fen, its ecology, and its people are so changed that it can never be restored, but we must still try to create something new and perhaps a mirror of sorts to the past. Here at Wicken there are great plans afoot to reverse the worst of farming’s atrocities and to try to restore at least a veneer of respectability to England’s last true fenland. However, step outside the protective banks and ditches of the old fen, and the land, though reverted from intensive farming to a broad, open, grazed landscape, is still dry. For technical and social (adjacent farming) reasons this land will never again be wet. Some areas of the most-recently drained fen have been restored with a degree of success, but the bigger landscape, like Hereward’s Saxon England, remains under the firm grip of its new master. The land is dry and the waters have been banished.

How the old fen might have looked. (Victorian print)

What do we know of the lost ecology? We can gain some insight into former vegetation and wildlife from meticulous analysis of pollen and animal remains preserved in peat or other anaerobic sediments because the lack of oxygen impedes the processes of decomposition. Remarkable discoveries at prehistoric sites provide a vision of the larger animals hunted and eaten by early settlers, but the living ecology eludes us. This was a vast landscape on a scale similar to the intractable wildernesses viewed by European settlers when they first arrived in North America. We get an idea of what they faced in the names they gave the landscape – such as the ‘Great Dismal Swamp’ – and yet they wrote too of the unimaginably rich wildlife, the flocks of birds and the super-abundant fish. This image is a starting point for our journey of discovery in search of the lost fens.

Along the eastern seaboard of England, the Fens stretched almost continuously from East Anglia to North Yorkshire. Beyond them were extensive heaths, moors, dunes, woods and forests, and great open sheep-walks, and the whole was linked by arteries and veins of rivers great and small, meandering across vast floodplains, curving, spilling, slow and tortuous; the life-blood of this remarkable ecology. Its loss represents the single most dramatic transformation of nature in British history, and yet today it barely merits a footnote in our accounts of England and the English. Just as David Lowenthal described the past as a ‘foreign country’, the lost fens were a different world.

SETTING THE SCENE

In 1536, the commoners of Lincolnshire made a complaint to King Henry VIII about the selection of his ministers and advisors, and through this the suppression of the monasteries and abbeys and other religious houses. Henry replied in his ‘Answer to the Petition of the Rebels and Traitors of Lincolnshire’. In this response he described them as ‘the rude commons of one shire’ and Lincolnshire itself as ‘one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm’. This gives some insight into how the region was viewed both from within and from the outside. The vast areas of farming commons and often-extensive wetlands retained independence and even a stubbornness and resistance to change or innovation. Early writers put this down to a deep retention of their Anglo-Saxon roots. It was around Ely, for example, that Hereward the Wake held out against the Norman invasion until he was betrayed by the Church. So it is an amazing transformation which, in a little over 500 years, has turned this region both in the Northern Fens and the Southern Fens into one of the world’s most productive farming landscapes. Even more surprising perhaps, is how the earlier landscapes and cultures have been erased almost entirely from the regions, and even from the cultural memory.

The reclamation of marsh and fen has been described as one of the most spectacular feats of colonisation of the landscape, as farmers and others moved onto lands wrested from the water. In many cases, the potential farmland was very fertile – a major attraction before petrochemical-subsidised agriculture. However, access to this resource was only available following reclamation. The fens and marshes that lay beyond arable farmland were often described as ‘waste’ but this was far from a true or fair label. As described later, the resources were indeed rich and, reflecting this affluence, they were subject to complex rights and practices that governed their use.

The products of marsh and fen included: fish (especially eels); fowl; rushes and sedge for thatching; peat for fuel and building; and withies and other wood for fuel, basket making, hurdles, and for light construction. These areas were also hugely important for grazing, even if the management of stock in a wet landscape posed some serious problems. Many of these uses changed the original, native landscape, and some, such as peat cutting, were capable of generating entirely new and distinctive landscapes over time. Large-scale reclamation and then enclosure of these wet fens and marshes was encouraged by the potential value of the land released. Over the centuries, we witness repeatedly the imperative of financial gain that has driven the inexorable process of reclamation. This often led to conflicts over resource use between local peasants and others who subsisted on the fen, and farmers and bigger landowners looking for economic benefit. These were often contested resources, bringing actors from different societies, communities and classes into direct conflict. However, other factors also influenced the interest in drying the wet landscape.

As we see in medieval times and more recently, the alleviation of floods and the protection from drastic and unpredictable inundation was a powerful driver to control water and to dry the land. Again, there may have been a difference in perspective and attitude between those used to living on the edge, the interface between land and water, and those looking to invest in farms and machinery or other resources. The latter may be desperate to control the water and avoid the flood; the former often learn to live with water and its unpredictability, and to reap from it its own unique harvests. In some parts of northern Europe, settlers in coastal wetlands built on artificial raised mounds and then sat out the flood when it inevitably came. With the floods came fish and fowl, and free fertiliser for summer pastures and hay meadows. The eventual land use varied from region to region, and over much of the Humber Levels of Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire (the Northern Fen) and the Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire fenland (the Southern Fen) the ultimate farming use has been as intensive arable. In other regions, such as the Somerset Levels, the land has generally ended up as pasture and hay meadow, with varying degrees of intensification.

As land was taken from fen and marsh, or in coastal zones from salt marsh and mudflat, there emerged a landscape of ditches, drains, dykes, embankments and sea banks. In the early stages this was inevitably piecemeal as work was undertaken by groups of freeholders or small communities, with progression sometimes and at other times abandonment as the waters took the land back. The pattern of landscape this created had a mix of fields of different sizes and shapes, often based on opportunistic colonisation and then sometimes necessary retrenchment and even retreat. More organised reclamation was probably undertaken in some areas by the Romans or at least the Romano-British, and then from late Anglo-Saxon times by ecclesiastical foundations. In the post-Conquest period, work was organised by the larger landowners, especially the abbeys and monasteries, though progress at all times was helped or hindered by climate change beyond the influence of the communities. Any large-scale reclamation was a massive undertaking and therefore required effective social and political organisation, and an economic system to provide the necessary support and indeed the incentive to carry out the works. Where successful, the reclamation process generally resulted in a distinctive local economy and population increase. Sometimes the latter was through the indigenous population multiplying, but other times it was through inward migration of skilled labour. As often is the case, this frequently met resistance from the native people.

The impacts of the stages of reclamation, even from the earliest times, are often locked in the present-day landscape – although modern intensive farming has erased much of the evidence. Even here though, there may still be place names, lane names, and field names that tell of an earlier time and the process of progress. The early works on reclaiming the Fens to farming helped generate wealth that left a legacy of great ecclesiastical houses, though Henry VIII did much to remove that evidence. However, the magnificent churches and even cathedrals that dot the contemporary landscapes of both the Northern and Southern Fens are a reminder of the productivity of the ‘improved’ fenland. Today the agricultural regions of these areas and of similar landscapes in Norfolk and Suffolk are amongst the most productive in the world.

Another incentive to ‘improve’ these lands was to control often independently minded and non-conforming communities. Wetlands were regarded by governments and by landowners as areas to which ne’er-do-wells, troublemakers and outlaws retreated from the long arm of authority. Indeed, these environments generated religions such as Methodism and Quakerism. In many ways, they were responsible for the uprisings that led to the English Civil War (seehere). By reclaiming the land from the waters, the communities themselves were ‘reclaimed’ to centralised authority.

Something to bear in mind from the outset of this discussion is that most, though not all, writers through time have regarded the process of reclamation and improvement for agriculture as an inherently ‘good thing’. During periods of intensive drainage, and of major enclosure and improvement, there were dissenting voices, but many of these were illiterate. There were a few individuals, such as John Clare, who wrote with passion about the impacts of improvements, but these are the exceptions and not the rule. Indeed, there is good reason, generally, why this should be so, since the spectre of famine and starvation hung in the air over the heads of our ancestors like the ague in the swamp itself. This was a strong reason and incentive to ‘improve’; at least in theory. This does mean that the information and accounts that we receive are biased to a degree by the viewpoint of the beholder. When reading these today, it is important to bear this in mind. However, the inherent view that drainage is good pervades even modern writing. Coones and Patten, writing in 1986, for example, state that:

… It is all the more depressing therefore to record the retreat which took place in the wetlands after the early fourteenth century, when many hard-won areas suffered from neglect and a lack of maintenance of their drainage works. But a start had been made, not only in the two principal regions but also in other coastal marshlands of southern and eastern England.

There is also a whole subject of enclosure and land improvement more generally, that is beyond this particular story. However, an understanding of the nature of the transformations in landscape and the agricultural economy, especially during the period from 1700 to 1950, is hugely important to any vision of these lost fens. The time from 1750 to 1850 is generally regarded as the age of the ‘improver’, and this agricultural revolution is mostly attached to the process of ‘Parliamentary Enclosure’, where common open fields and common grazing lands such as heath, meadow, waste and fen were enclosed as privately owned and managed fields. The reality is more complex and there are numerous regional variations on this general theme. Many innovations that characterised the process of improvement were in place and adopted well before Parliamentary Enclosure. However, the process of individual Acts of Parliament to facilitate the process applied a massive steamroller to the impetus of change. Some areas were already in part enclosed and to a degree improved, and others had not and could not be, because of the difficult terrain or conditions such as the wetness of the Fens.

Agricultural developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included the introduction of new crops and new technologies to facilitate cultivation and improvement. Advances in farming practice brought new lands into cultivation and the spread of root crops with sown grasses and clover made it possible to keep large numbers of sheep. This was particularly important in sandy heaths and other areas of lighter soils where the animals produced valuable manure that helped the structure and fertility of the soil. Sheep were ‘folded’ on lands being improved to raise the nutrient status and the organic matter content. Carefully managed rotations of these crops enabled programmes of improvement and enhanced productivity. There were major additions to both arable and pasturelands through the enclosing and improvement of heaths and other commons; and the processes described above, together with liming or marling, brought much of this about. On clay lands, the soils were under-drained using improved technologies developed over a period of around two centuries. In the marshes and fens, as described later, a process of piecemeal drainage and reclamation was undertaken. Low-lying areas were targeted by occasionally ambitious (and sometimes over-ambitious) schemes for their drainage and to bring them into cultivation. The most spectacular successes were in eastern England, across East Anglia and northwards into Yorkshire. In the fens, the lands were drained and enclosed for the production of ‘all sorts of corne and grasses’. It was the great drainage schemes of Cornelius Vermuyden that brought about the most obvious changes; though, as we shall see, others both before and after him also played major roles. Nevertheless, Vermuyden was able to declare in 1652 that ‘the area now known as the Bedford Level had been well and truly drained’. However, again as we note later on, the celebrations were often premature and reclamation was followed by disastrous floods and sometimes by other consequences too.

Indeed, the transformation of these wetlands generated unexpected consequences, and at the time, the available technology and knowledge were generally not able to counter these. The most obvious effects were the silting up of major rivers and other minor watercourses, with the result that water, instead of draining to the sea, began to be impounded and ponded back onto the land. At the same time, the consequence of the drainage that had taken place was the shrinkage of the peat and therefore a lowering of the land surface across large areas of the fens. Combined with the effects on the rivers described earlier, and in coastal zones with sea level changes and bad storms, this was a recipe for potential disaster.

Along with further programmes of drainage and embanking, the solution at the time was the construction of hundreds of windmills across the fenlands, with the objective of removing water into the rivers and drains. The mills were able to pump water from the lower fens and marshes up and into the drainage channels and rivers that now stood considerably higher than the surrounding lands. However, the draining and drying of the peat produced a positive feedback loop with a lowering of the ground surface, which ultimately made the problems worse and the lands more vulnerable to catastrophic flooding. Not only this, but the windmills were also dependent on suitable weather conditions in order to operate. In many ways this meant that, with available technologies, the pre-industrial drainage of the fenlands had reached the limits of its capability. The development of steam-powered pumps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moved the drainage and reclamation towards the ultimate removal of the wetlands from the landscape.

The process of improvement affected the whole community as well as the environment in which people lived and worked. Often we see this ‘improved’ landscape in the fenland regions today, with any hint of the earlier period wiped from view. The independent commoners who eked a living from the fens often lived in poor and very basic accommodation. With improvement, they and their dwellings were swept aside and replaced with planned farms and neat estate cottages. The poor peasants generally lived in cottages that were neither built to last, nor constructed by craftsmen, but put together with materials easily and freely available by the people themselves. Sanitation, needless to say, was absent. Their squalid shelters were constructed with walls of earth, clay or turf and hazel or willow rods, some stone and perhaps timber supports. The roof was thatched with reed and turf, and the heating would be with local peat or perhaps small wood. There was generally no chimney, just a hole in the roof, and smoke went out of the door and any windows. The acrid peat smoke had the added benefit in the summer of keeping out biting insects, especially midges and mosquitoes.

From the Middle Ages up to the early 1800s, poverty was endemic in these primitive rural societies, and the impact of improvement was mixed. For some it might mean the provision of better housing annexed to a larger farm, and for others there would be paid employment, but often seasonal or part-time. For others it spelt even worse poverty as the ‘free’ commons were lost to a new generation of improving landowners and newly rich farmers. Very often, topographers and other writers of the time ignored and overlooked the condition and even the existence of these poor people. Sometimes the evidence remains in the landscape today in place names and field names such as Poor’s Piece, Poor Lands, etc. Often though, the march of progress has swept aside most of the physical connections to the past and its people. The poor themselves, displaced from their lands, drifted to regional market towns and then to the great cities that grew out of the Industrial Revolution. In the words of a long-forgotten fenland ballad-monger:

In Holland, in the fenny lands,

Be sure you mark where Croyland stands.

Croyland wine is but so-so,

Sedge instead of hay doth grow,

A bed like stone whereon to lie,

And so begone, without ‘Goodbye’.

THE NORTHERN FEN OF YORKSHIRE AND NORTH LINCOLNSHIRE

In the early 1960s, Alice Garnett, a geographer at Sheffield University, was one of the first authors to write of the ‘Humber Fen’ and the ‘Humber Levels’. She described how the landscape to the east of the exposed coalfield of South Yorkshire changed markedly at the point where the River Don runs through the Don Gorge for around 4 miles (6.4km), cutting through the dramatic 300-400ft (90-120km) Magnesian Limestone Ridge that runs north / south. At the western end is the great Norman Conisbrough Castle, guarding the strategically important point of the river and route ways north to south, and east to west. This is the land of Sir Walter Scott and of Ivanhoe. Our wetlands lie east of here, where the river opens out into a low, broad plain of the Humberhead Levels that remain from the once great proglacial Lake Humber. The land surface is covered by postglacial deposits of drift or mud (boulder clay) and alluvium from early watercourses that meandered across this vast featureless plain in prehistory. The consequences for the landscape which evolved over time until recently, was an expansive, waterlogged or wet area with few obvious features to stand out. Most of the land is or was around 25ft (7.5km) or less above sea level; and much is at or around the contemporary modern sea level.

Garnett goes on to describe the remains of ancient peat bogs, now mostly drained, around Thorne and Hatfield Moors. She notes how, over long periods of prehistoric and historic times, much of the region was lake or fen, with just a few islands on the Keuper and Bunter Sandstones rising above the fenland around Thorne. The only other dry surfaces were on outwash delta deposits of sands and gravels. It was on these rare zones of dry, or at least drier, land that human settlement was possible. The Roman road north from London diverted to follow these stepping-stones across the fen and marsh, resulting in the Roman station at Doncaster being on the lowest solid ground where it was possible to construct a crossing over river and wetland. The fenland itself was valued by fishermen and fowlers, and by those seeking respite from persecution and sanctuary from the law. In its later periods, from Saxon times onwards, much of the region was preserved as a royal hunting chase. This process, and the more detailed account of settlement patterns and uses, are described later.

The great wetland extended beyond the region called the Humberhead Levels today and beyond that used by Garnett in the 1960s. In the north, the fenland extended along the Derwent and Ouse to York and up the Hull Valley into Holderness, and in the south, it sent fingers of wetland and marsh along the Trent Valley and the Ancholme in north Lincolnshire. Taken together with the Vale of Pickering, these made up what I call the Northern Fens, and it was not until the drainage schemes of the early seventeenth century that the region’s wetland landscape was significantly changed. The works of Vermuyden and his ‘Adventurers’ (as they were sneeringly called by the seventeenth-century fenmen who smashed their sluices and pulled down their dykes) and then of those who followed, changed the landscape from a wetland, with the Rivers Don, Torne, and Idle meandering over a vast flatland between the great Rivers Ouse and Trent, to one of productive farmland. The Don was diverted north along the new Dutch River to the Ouse confluence at Goole. The Idle and the Torne were taken into new channels to the Trent north of Axholme. Then, with pumping by windmills and the practice of warping (described here), the land was transformed into productive farmland and dispersed settlements and farmsteads. Through the 1800s and 1900s there followed further and more effective drainage of the remaining fens and marshes, and the improvement and under-drainage of much of the farmland. This process, as we shall see towards the end of our story, continued largely unabated until the 1990s. By the late twentieth century, even the memories of this once great wetland were erased from the corporate mental maps of the region.

THE SOUTHERN FEN OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE AND LINCOLNSHIRE

In 1961, A.T. Grove of the University of Cambridge described the characteristic landscape of the Southern Fenland as over 1,200 square miles (1920km) of land below the water level when the spring tides flood into the Wash and then run up the Rivers Nene, Witham, Welland, and Great Ouse. Running down the coastline along the eastern shore of the Wash is a belt of farmland about 2 miles (3.2km) across that has been reclaimed from the sea. This is overlooked by the old cliff from the low sandy hills of Sandringham and Snettisham to beyond King’s Lynn as far as Denver. Cross over the Wash, and extensive marshes and mudflats flank the Lincolnshire coastline of Lindsey. These Lincolnshire coastal marshes merge into the now largely drained Fen running from the East Coast along the broad valley of the River Witham close to Lincoln. At the Steeping River, this wetland was around 7 miles across and grew to nearly 10 miles (16km) by the time it reached Boston. Moving further south, beyond the River Witham, were the former wetland areas of Holland, the lands around the Isle of Ely, and the once extensive wetlands in Huntingdonshire, across Cambridgeshire, and parts of western Norfolk, even into Suffolk. Much of this was former wetland, and extensive areas are today below sea level. Though now drained, this landscape remains one of the most regionally distinct areas in Britain. There is relatively little obvious variation across much of the area; the major changes being from the coastal siltlands nearer the Wash, to the peat fens further inland. Nowadays much of the peat has disappeared anyway.

In the times just after the most recent Ice Age, the sea was about 100ft (30m) lower than it is today. The fenland basin and the surrounding lands were drained by a number of rivers that ran across a broad, shallow valley which ran north-east between the chalk uplands of Lincolnshire and north Norfolk. It then flowed out into a tiny proto-North Sea. As noted later, various rocks and geological formations outcropped above the valley-bottom sediments and around the periphery of what is now the fenland. River and marine gravels and sands mark out this early landscape in the Fens of today. Some of the higher ground, such as in the Northern Fen, would have been covered with a forest of oak and pine. This was lost at an early stage as sea level and the water-table rose, and perhaps through human influence too. In both the Northern and Southern Fens ‘bog oaks’ have long been a feature of the reclaimed fens. As peat developed and grew above the surrounding land, the surface was colonised by trees and shrubs such as alder, willow and birch. On drier ground, oak and hazel became established. Inundation by the sea, such as in Neolithic times, caused dieback of the woodland and whole areas were left under thick deposits of marine clays and silts. Sedge peats then began to grow again over this clay layer and over the earlier peats, and often had relatively high alkali content due to their feeder streams coming off the chalk uplands. South of Whittlesea, the conditions suited the development of acidic peats and a massive raised bog developed, similar to the features that dominated the pre-drainage landscape of Thorne and Hatfield Moors in the Northern Fens. The southerly parts of the Southern Fens also retained large areas of open water and the conditions led to the formation of deposits known as ‘shelly marls’. It seems that by the Bronze Age, much of the Southern Fen was relatively dry, and archaeological finds indicate settlement on the higher and drier zones. However, changes in climate, sea level and drainage conditions caused deterioration and the landscape became wetter into the Iron Age. By the Roman period, the coastline was some 10 miles (16km) or so inland from where it is today. Topographic and archaeological evidence suggest colonisation at this time and some reclamation of coastal marshes. However, it is also clear that at the same time there were significant depositions and accumulations of alluvium along the rivers and down the artificially created channels. This process produced an accretion of materials as the watercourses entered the Wash, and one consequence was a ponding up and a backing up of water flowing downstream from inland.

These general trends in deposition and drainage influenced subsequent human colonisation as communities moved into the region to eke out a living in this environment between land and water. The early Saxon settlements, for example, were along the coastline of the Wash, located on a chain of low sandy islands mostly only a couple of miles across. In the north-western part, these ran to Boston, and south to Wisbech and on to King’s Lynn. From these coastal settlements expansion occurred in two directions. One was a coastal pathway made by the embanking and reclamation of salt marsh from the sea, and the other was inland into the fens, which involved localised drainage and embanking to prevent flooding by freshwater. The marine alluvium of the silt fens is now about 10ft (3km) or so above sea level. However, following drainage and drying, the peat fens have shrunk and now lie at or below mean sea level.

As discussed later, the drainage of the Southern Fens was very complex, involving many centuries of piecemeal works, and efforts both small-scale and large-scale, to overcome the difficulties presented by the vast flatland. Several problems complicated the whole process of drainage and reclamation, and then of colonisation and settlement of the land. The latter included the independence and stubbornness of the native fenlanders and the need for political control and economic resources in order to achieve effective drainage. The former included the fundamental difficulties of the expansive flat landscape, the rivers silting up at their outfalls, the potential risks of marine inundation, and the high flood levels of the rivers that ran across the fenland but which drained huge catchments inland as far as Lincoln, Luton, and Leicester. One consequence is that almost every river has been modified, straightened and canalised into raised embankments.

The Car Dyke running westwards from Waterbeach on the Granta towards the early line of the Ouse, then went from Peterborough to Lincoln, along the western boundary of the great fenland. This was a Roman construction, perhaps in part for drainage but probably with a principal role of military transport, boats being facilitated to move from Cambridge to Lincoln, and then via the Foss Dyke and the River Trent, northwards to the major settlement of York. The old path of the River Nene is followed by the Cat’s Water and the county boundary from the Isle of Ely to Holland in Lincolnshire. The medieval river was ‘cut’ through the Isle of March with an artificial channel to join the old course of the Granta and Ouse at Upwell. The so-called ‘roddons’ are low silty ridges that mark out the paths of the ancient watercourses across the Southern Fenland. Here, meandering across the ancient black peat fens, the river system converged on an estuary outfall to the Wash at Wisbech or Ousebeach. When the Bedford Ouse diverted south of the Isle of Ely this was changed and then altered dramatically by the late medieval work to take the combined flow of the Granta and Ouse, and the Nene, along the Well Creek and then into the Wash at King’s Lynn. The south-eastern boundary between Norfolk and Suffolk and the Isle of Ely follows the line of a roddon that was the bed of the River Little Ouse back in the medieval period.

Until the later medieval times, the landscapes of the Southern Fens were ‘improved’ piecemeal. River diversions, embankments, and new channels were constructed, and lands were drained. Nevertheless, reclamation was only partially successful and there remained the ever-present threats of both coastal and inland flooding. With problems inherent in any attempt at a wholesale approach to the task, and only limited co-ordination, large tracts of the fens lay out of the grasp of would-be reclaimers. The most comprehensive attempts at drainage and improvement had been by the Romans and then by the monasteries. With rivers silting up, storm damage and surges, and the collapse of poorly maintained banks, the situation remained problematic until the seventeenth century. Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and their assets were dispersed to a new generation of landowners. These landowners, combined with opportunist businessmen in London and investors from overseas, saw the potential opportunities to be gained by the wresting of the fenlands from the waters.

The Duke of Bedford’s proposals to drain the Great Level were supported by other ‘gentlemen Adventurers’, and were to be implemented by the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden. The solution was considered to lie in the straightening of the old meandering watercourses and the facilitation of their discharge swiftly to the Wash. So the Old Bedford River was excavated in 1637 and took water from the River Ouse, north-east from Earith to Salter’s Lode. This was effective at freeing much of the land from summer flooding and allowing its use for grazing, though often not in winter. Fourteen years after this, the New Bedford River was also cut and ran parallel to the old one, leaving the land in-between as a holding reservoir for excess water at times of flood. This is the Ouse Washes and remains today as a series of major nature reserves. Tong’s Drain was cut, and St John’s Eau was cut to shorten the Ouse from Denver to Stowbridge. Popham’s Eau led water from the Nene to the Ouse below Denver and the Forty Foot Drain joined the Bedford River. By this stage, the major changes in the main arterial drainage channels had been made, and they can still be seen today across the now agricultural fenland. The waters had not yet been altogether subdued, but with a new order imposed, landscape and much else from earlier millennia were changed forever.

With problems of silting river-mouths and shrinking peat in the Southern Fens of Cambridgeshire and south Lincolnshire, the general wetness of the landscape and occasional catastrophic floods remained. Gradually, however, individual landowners supplemented the bigger projects with their own pumping schemes, often through independent Commissions of Drainage. The River Boards had the task of ensuring that the water then got away to the sea, in this case the Wash. Thus, through this period, there was a gradual improvement in the drainage of the Southern Fens but, until the eighteenth century, large areas around Ely, lands between Whittlesea and March, and peatlands north of the Rivers Glen and Witham, were still often drowned in winter and thus problematic for agriculture. In 1773, Kinderley’s Cut, and from Wisbech the River Nene, effectively took water off the North Level. This had the effect of lowering water levels in the drains in the south and west. North of the Wash, the extensive East and West Wildmore Fens were still very wet. Here and elsewhere, the high prices of grain stimulated by the Napoleonic Wars were the financial incentive for active reclamation.

The Southern Fen’s largest remaining stretch of open water was Whittlesey or Whittlesea Mere, which survived until 1853 (regarded by many as the date of the completion of the drainage of the Southern Fenland). However, the process of drainage and land improvement continued literally to mop up the remaining sites, as we shall see later, and to drain more effectively the wider landscape. During the middle and late twentieth century, both the Southern and Northern Fens were further drained and improved as intensive farming grew, with petrochemical-dependent agriculture based on artificial fertilisers subsidised by UK government funds and then EU grants. By the 1960s and 1970s, almost no real fenland remained in the Southern Fens. The few exceptions were the patches of habitat such as the nature reserves at Wicken Fen, Holme Fen, and Woodwalton Fen, but of these, only Wicken really represents how the old fens might have looked.

One problem for the remaining sites, which are small in comparison with the original extent of fenland, but quite large compared to many nature reserves, is that the traditional activities that helped shape the fens have generally ceased. For centuries, these were cultural landscapes where nature and people interacted, generally in a long-term sustainable way, but the traditions have been lost and the old communities dissipated. The result is that the character of the fenland has been irrevocably changed and much biodiversity has been lost forever. Wicken shows some signs of the ancient wilderness but the lack of cultural traditional management means that ecological change known as succession takes place. Attempts to maintain some of the traditions help, but these are mostly at the level of being demonstrations rather than having the complexity and intensity of the subsistence management of earlier centuries. There is still a feel of wild nature across much of the fenland, often due to the ‘big sky’ of the open flat landscape. In addition, if you go to the mudflats and marshes of the Wash beyond the sea walls, albeit artificially created, there is a feel of real wilderness and wild nature. Across the bulk of the fenland itself the ghost of the primeval fen has faded, much peat has wasted and more is lost each year. The sites of now dry meres with their shell marl stand out across the landscape. In much of the fenland with the peat lost, the agriculture cultivates the clays and the lower sands, and, over time, further distinctiveness is eroded. The perched rivers and straight drains bear testimony to the processes of reclamation, and the grand churches and their villages to the affluence of the post-reclamation farming.

With the introduction of steam pumps in the early nineteenth century, the technological difficulties in achieving a drained landscape were largely overcome. Over time, diesel oil, and then electricity, replaced steam. Yet there have still been catastrophic floods during the twentieth century, with the obvious examples of 1947 and then 1953. The latter was due to a storm surge which caused the River Ouse to break its banks and overflow between Denver and the Wash. The more general threat is from spring floods hitting higher levels further south. Whilst the North Level was significantly protected from floods by the cut made in 1832, and the problems of the Middle Level were largely resolved by a major pumping station constructed at Wiggenhall St Germans in 1934, the South Level remained vulnerable until well into the twentieth century. Despite it being the most distant from the sea, it flooded badly in 1937 and 1939, and then again in 1947. The latter was one of the most catastrophic floods in history, when rapid snow thaw after heavy snow and then rain resulted in swollen rivers, which could not discharge into the sea due to extreme high tides. The waters backed up and the rivers burst their banks to spectacular effect. The consequence was a flood extending over 37,000 acres (14,973 hectares) to the east of Earith. Detailed assessments in the aftermath of the disaster suggested that a recurrence could easily occur unless drastic action was taken to improve the rate of discharge of the Rivers Ouse / Granta at Denver. With this in mind, a scheme began in 1956 with a straight channel cut from just above the Denver Sluice to an outfall to the tidal river above King’s Lynn. Interestingly, this action was rather similar to part of the solution that Cornelius Vermuyden had proposed centuries earlier, but finance did not permit the works to be undertaken. By the time the project was commissioned in the late 1950s, the costs were around £12 million, but the works dramatically reduced the risks of major floods in the future. Over the whole area of the Fens, the process of reclamation and of drainage continued, along with protection against flooding. Between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s, a further 5 square miles (8km2) of tidal lands around the Wash were reclaimed as part of the post-war rush towards self-sufficiency. In A.T. Grove’s account in the early 1960s, the possible reclamation of the entire Wash was discussed, perhaps to include a whole new town or even a speedway racing track. Interestingly, in terms of perceptions, the final comment is that whilst this might not happen because of the technical difficulties, it would ‘bring the evolution of the fenland region to a fitting conclusion’.

THE PROCESS OF PEAT WASTING AND THE EVIDENCE OF THE HOLME POST

It is suggested that prior to the draining the peat was around 10ft (3m) above mean sea level. After the peat fens were drained, the surface shrank and wasted with a rate of approximately 2ft (0.6m) every ten years. The initial loss of volume and hence elevation was due to shrinkage as a direct result of the removal of water. After this early phase there is further loss due to wasting of peat by bacterial breakdown, and then by physical blowing away of the desiccated material. Just south of the former Whittlesea Mere is the Holme Post, driven into the peat surface in 1851 (or according to some authors 1850 or 1852), just two years before the drainage of the mere by William Wells, the local squire who was one of the architects of the drainage and who wanted to gauge the impact of shrinkage. The iron post was taken from Crystal Palace and sunk to its top in the deep peat. The impact of the Whittlesea drainage was immediately obvious and by 1860 the top of the post was a good 5ft (1.5m) above the ground surface. By 1892, there was 10ft (3m) protruding, though after this time the wastage appeared to slow. This may have been because the more easily dried and eroded upper peats had been exhausted, but additionally because of changes in land use close to the post. Land nearby, abandoned from cultivation, was colonised by birch wood, and then became the Holme Fen Nature Reserve.

Across the wider fenland, however, the peat erosion has continued unabated, to expose clays and sands lying beneath it. The fastest and most drastic erosion, for the reasons already given, often occurred soon after initial drainage. Another reason for this was that early reclamation often included the process of ‘paring and burning’ prior to cultivation. In this, the upper surface of materials was cut or pared and then piled up to be burnt, the resulting ashes acting as fertiliser. The general rate of loss has been around an inch each year. In the south of the Holland district, the thin peats were mostly lost by the mid to late 1800s, leaving heavy clays exposed at the surface.

In the early 1800s, it was realised that the turning up of marly clays by the plough had a beneficial impact on soil texture and structure. Because of these observations, there was a move to add clay marl to the peat soils deliberately. This was achieved by digging parallel trenches to spread the marly clay over the peat, with around 100 tons of clay per acre of land. The impacts were found to last for at least a few decades, and importantly they included the reduction of wind erosion. However, and of greater long-term importance, the insidious loss of peat by bacterial oxidation remained unchecked. By 1974, the Holme Post stood proud about 12 to 13ft (3.6 to 3.9m) above the surrounding lands.

After reclamation, the deepest peats to be found were around the southern edges of the Fens, though even these areas are several feet less than their original depths. The impact can be seen in some areas, where the chalky beds of former meres stand proud above the surrounding fields of former peatlands. Roads, embankments and even railway lines have long been subject to severe problems of subsidence and require specially designed construction. Houses too have suffered. Where once there were flimsy owner-constructed shacks, hovels and cottages, there are now more robust structures. However, the early construction of these new dwellings did not always allow for the dramatic movement in land surface, especially where peat shrinkage has been uneven. Buildings designed for stable dry land toppled and cracked. As noted earlier, the most obvious manifestation of land shrinkage is in the rivers, drains and roads perched high above the surrounding fields. The complication for land management and agriculture is that the more the land sinks, the higher the water must be pumped to get it off the surface and into the main drains.

THE STORY OF THE DRAINAGE

This account tries to set down some of the key events, and to tease out some idea of what the great fens looked like pre-drainage. We set out to find out who was responsible and why these wetlands were destroyed. It also looks ahead and attempts to draw together some of the unexpected consequences of these ‘improvements’. In the context of the twenty-first century, I consider the current initiatives to re-construct areas of functioning wetland ecosystems. This cannot be comprehensive, since there is simply too much ground to cover; but it aims at a new approach and a new awareness of both loss and of future potential. In particular, I have linked the two main fenland regions of eastern England, as the Northern Fens and the Southern Fens, to show how their histories and their environments are inextricably linked. I have written a description of how the great fens and other wetlands were seen by people, both local residents and those who visited. These perceptions, and the associated great fears of diseases such as the ague – not to mention the fears of those in political power, of dissention, unorthodoxy and unrest – helped drive the moves to destroy the wetlands and to assert human control over nature.

The east England fens.

The consequences of the changes wrought over three centuries probably constitute the greatest single loss of wildlife habitat in Britain and maybe in Europe. This was an ecological catastrophe almost beyond comprehension. At the end of the process, it is difficult to give any accurate figures for the scale of loss. For the reasons I explain in the book, there was the drainage of the great fens themselves, but also much wider peripheral and progressive drainage of surrounding lands too. For many of these areas we often have no perception now that they were indeed ever wet. However, a very rough estimate might be that in the Southern Fens of Lincolnshire, Huntingdonshire, and Cambridgeshire we have lost around 2,500 square miles (4,000km2). In the Northern Fens, the figure is perhaps slightly less, with around 1,900 square miles (3,000km2). This is just a very rough calculation but to put it into perspective, in the Southern Fen alone, it would amount to nearly half a million large football pitches’ worth. When you read, at the end of the book, the work being done by bodies such as the National Trust to reinstate what are by today’s standards large areas of wetland, it is worth bearing in mind how much we have lost.

The Southern Fens.

The Northern Fens.

Finally, and before we go on, it is important to realise that whilst the fens were being drained through the period from the 1630s to the 1980s, the wider landscape was also being ‘improved’ and desiccated. This is largely beyond the scope of this book, but if we turn our gaze fleetingly from the fen and marsh to the extensive farmlands of pasture and arable, the lowlands, heaths and commons, and the great upland moors and blanket bogs, all these lands have been intensively drained and mostly improved. Even to step inside an ancient woodland is often to pass over complex and intensive drainage networks. Through recent history, vast areas of land in countryside areas – and especially uplands – across Britain were desiccated deliberately and actively, and consequences include massive carbon release, catastrophic loss of biodiversity, and hugely increased flood-risk. This is a wider context for the fenland story. Turning back the drainage of the east England fens, this is the story of loss, but it must also be a vision for restoration where possible, and a salutary tale for the wetlands of the planet still to come under the eager and often pernicious gaze of the drainage engineer.

1

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF THE FENS

Wetlands are not always, and for some not ever, the most pleasant of places. In fact, they have often been seen as horrific places. In the patriarchal western cultural tradition, wetlands have been associated with death and disease, the monstrous and the melancholic, if not, the downright mad. Wetlands are ‘black waters’. They have even been seen as a threat to health and sanity, to the clean and proper body, and mind. The typical response to the horrors and threats posed by wetlands has been simple and decisive: dredge, drain or fill and so ‘reclaim’ them. Yet the idea of reclaiming wetlands begs the questions of reclaimed from what? For what? For whom? A critical history of wetlands’ drainage could quite easily be entitled ‘Discipline and Drain’.

Rod Giblett (1996)