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 highland clearances. Rather nearer to his employer’s family seat 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
