The remains of water mills have been consistently removed; the weirs that hold up river levels have been dismantled; and millponds and millraces have been filled with the dredgings. On the Worcestershire Stour, ten mill sites have been removed in as many years. The ancient fords which hold up the water are dredged out, along with their water crowfoot. In the late 1970s, the Anglo-Saxon ‘stretford’ of Stratford-upon-Avon was taken out.
The inexorable desiccation of the Fens, the Somerset Levels, and the Lancashire mosses is exposing remarkable artefacts of early civilization, long preserved in the wet peat. But in the absence of an effective liaison between drainage engineers and archaeologists, there is a danger that such remarkable finds as the Bronze Age settlement built on a timber ‘island’ recently rescued at Flag Fen near Peterborough could be broken up by diggers or left to crumble on exposure to the atmosphere.16 fn10
Major wetlands are obvious victims of drainage. Casualties since the Second World War have included the river Idle washlands in Nottinghamshire and large parts of Romney Marsh, Otmoor, and the Lancashire mosses. Major debates have been held since the late 1970s over the future of wetlands in Sussex, Somerset, Yorkshire, and East Anglia. Wetlands under threat have included a variety of landscapes: swamps of tall reed or reed sweet-grass; marshes of rush and sedge, which sometimes develop into scrub of willow and bog myrtle; fens, whose lush vegetation is nourished by alkaline groundwater, and which range from open pools, often the remains of peat cutting, to grazed beds of meadowsweet and iris, grading in turn to the wet woodlands known as alder ‘carr’. Additionally threatened are mires such as the mosses of the north-west, whose deep peatlands support sphagnum moss and heather, scattered with glades of birch, the favourite haunt of nightjars. Finally, there are flowery hay meadows and damp pastures, intersected by dykes patrolled by dragonflies in summer and all submerged in winter by the silver flood, which draws in dark clouds of wildfowl and companies of wild white swans. The destruction of such places in our time has been startling.
In 1983 the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy Council, the Government’s watchdog on conservation, produced a definitive report on the destruction of habitat in Great Britain since 1949.17 Among the casualties wholly or partly attributable to drainage were 97 per cent of herb-rich hay meadows, 50 per cent of lowland fens, and 60 per cent of lowland raised mires, all lost in the space of a generation. In the mid-1980s the Norfolk Broads were losing an average of 1,500 acres per year.fn11
All this has happened because enormous sums of public money available for drainage schemes since the Second World War have combined with a revolution in technology with which we have not yet fully 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.
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
