they did not succeed in totally obliterating what had been before. Meandering across the geometrical landscape of straight ditches and square fields which the new engineers and their successors created, the winding courses of the original pre-drainage creeks and rivers can be seen especially clearly from the air. As they flowed on their – as it turned out – not so eternal journey from the hinterland of Ely and Cambridge to the Wash, these rivers deposited silt along their beds; and now, although the rivers vanished centuries ago, this silt stands out, a startling pale-fawn colour, as it snakes across the adjacent black peat of the Fens. Thus you can still pick out with ease the route of the ancient Wellestream, along which, in the fourteenth century, came cargoes of cloth from the Low Countries and silks from Italy, not to mention news of the dawning Renaissance, bound for Cambridge and beyond. Even more astonishing is that you can see the Wellestream more easily with every passing year. This is because the adjacent peat, as it is drained and dried out, wastes away by a process of oxidation on exposure to the atmosphere. Hence the old silt river beds, known in the Fens as ‘roddons’, are rising steadily as ridges above the ever-falling peat. They are landscape ghosts; but instead of fading away, they sharpen ever more clearly into focus.
Rivers have always been boundaries, as well as route-ways. They dictate the shape of many land-holdings, parishes, counties, and even parts of the Welsh and Scottish borders, as is well known to the poor river engineer who has to negotiate with different landowners, not to mention councils, on opposing banks as they try to promote their schemes. With boundaries go hedges, and some of those still remaining have been part of the farmed landscape since Saxon times, or possibly even earlier. Boundary hedges tend to be the oldest hedges, and a number of these are found bordering brooks and streams. Techniques developed by botanists and historians have shown that it is possible to assess the age of a hedge by the number of shrub species it contains.10 So the hedges that most interest the historian are those that most fascinate the botanist. To the layperson they are also arguably the most beautiful, with all the tangled richness and variety of oak, ash, buckthorn, elder, and wild rose. In general, a hedge will contain in a 30-yard length one shrub species for every century of its life. This is not an immutable law, but the correlation has been sufficiently demonstrated to be a valuable guide.
Snow picks out the ancient ridge and furrow, which is overlain by enclosure hedges. Warwickshire.
These are the relationships that print the character on the landscape. It is the same with the various damselflies in their clay and gravel streams, the water mill with its grey willows and grey wagtails, and the crowfoot crowning the ford and the curve in ridge and furrow. This is what the Englishness of England is made of, and it is this sense of place that we are currently in danger of losing, just as we come to understand it more clearly. It is far more important than any particular beetle or bird or ancient monument. The long evolution of the natural system, further evolved by human management, has given brooks and rivers individual characters as distinctive as their names, names which invest the Ordnance Survey map with an idiosyncratic quality ranging from poetry to comedy: the Windrush, the Swift, the Wagtail Brook, the Mad Brook, the Hell Brook, the Piddle, the Wriggle …
Take another look at The Hay Wain. Constable was a miller’s son, and probably knew all there was to know about mills such as Flatford. He was concerned here above all to paint a working landscape, not just a decorative one; and the empty wain is fording the stream to collect more hay from the labourers in the distant field. It was probably there for another reason too. George Sturt, who wrote about his practical experience of running a wheelwright’s shop at the end of the nineteenth century, describes the constant problem of shrinkage of timber wheelstocks in high summer:
Men who used carts knew something about the advantage of a little moisture for tightening wheels. Not for the horse’s sake alone was it that carters would drive through a roadside pond, or choose to ford a stream rather than go over a bridge beside the ford. The wheels were better for the wetting.11
The ghost of a long-vanished river winds across the level geometry of the Fens. The silt bed of the old river now stands out against the adjacent black peat. © Cambridge University Collection of Air Photographs.
Cartwheels soaking in the river in order to tighten them. Constable’s famous hay wain was part of a working landscape, not simply a picturesque one. © National Gallery.
Sturt and others record how wagons for the Sussex clay country were designed with broad wheels, while those for downland chalk had narrow ones. Taking individual orders from customers, the wheelwright built each cart for the particular conditions of a particular farm. This is taking a sense of the particular about as far as you can go: humanity evolving as harmoniously with the landscape as the mayfly nymph evolved in harmony with its stream. No wonder farmers tell us that they are the creators and guardians of the English countryside.
Now, for the first time in the long history of settling our islands, the guardians have become the destroyers. The landscape that generation after generation created is like a classroom blackboard at the end of a day, on which each lesson has been written without entirely erasing the previous one. Medieval ridge and furrow are overlain by a grid of more recent hedgerows. The winding Wellestream can be glimpsed through the level geometry of the Fens. In the space of a generation, we have set about wiping the blackboard clean.
THE IMPACT OF RIVER MANAGEMENT
Rivers and streams have been straightened and evened out as never before. This work has been carried out by water authorities, internal drainage boards, and many councils, in part to reduce flooding of roads and houses, but largely to increase farm yields. In the years between 1971 and 1980, an annual average of 207,217 acres was estimated to have been drained, of which ‘new’ drainage of wetlands comprised around 20,000 acres per year.12 One straightened stream begins to resemble another. River organisms’ ability to survive the disruption of floods was never evolved to withstand this kind of onslaught. Repeated dredging has removed the weedy margins upon which dragonflies depend. In the last twenty-five years, four dragonfly species have become extinct in England, while many others have shown a marked decline. Reduction of such insect populations will in turn reduce the fish population, which depends on a diversified, rather than a straightened and uniform, channel. With the loss of the fish, we can expect to lose the electric-blue flash of the kingfisher. The dredgings are put in the bottoms of furrows or are used to fill in ponds. With the virtual disappearance of the farm pond, frog populations in some parts of England declined drastically between the 1950s and the 1970s.fn7
Many streams have been stripped of their ancient boundary trees, and the knock-on effect of the drainage schemes has been to encourage farmers to turn their farms into prairies. Between 1946 and 1963, around 85,000 miles of hedges were grubbed out.13 The lowering of water levels to allow ploughing of damp pasture has removed the nesting habitat of many birds that we used to take for granted, such as snipe, lapwing, and redshank. A survey of Oxfordshire in 198214 found only 15 breeding pairs of redshank, compared to 112 pairs in a similar survey in 1939.fn8
Studies have shown that the water vole, ‘Ratty’ of The Wind in the Willows, has become scarce in many areas, due to intensive management of river banks.15 Indeed, Ratty’s emotional, if not his ecological, headquarters, the river Pang between Reading and Newbury, where Kenneth Grahame wrote his classic, has been subjected to a notoriously insensitive drainage scheme.fn9
In some counties, such as Staffordshire, a previously common wetland plant such
