the first to regret the loss of what must have been one of the finest natural systems in Europe. He describes immense tracts of pale reed and dark-green alder stretching from Cambridge to Peterborough, from King’s Lynn to the foot of the Lincolnshire wolds, where:
high overhead hung, motionless, hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as far as eye could see. Far off, upon the silver mere, would rise a puff of smoke from a punt, invisible from its flatness and its white paint. Then down the wind came the boom of the great stanchion-gun; and after that sound another sound, louder as it neared; a cry as of all the bells of Cambridge, and all the hounds of Cottesmore; and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of terrified wild-fowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the air with the hoarse rattle of their wings, while clear above all sounded the wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of the great wild swan.
They are all gone now … Ah, well, at least we shall have wheat and mutton instead, and no more typhus and ague; and, it is to be hoped, no more brandy-drinking and opium-eating; and children will live and not die.1
Major wetlands present in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
There speaks the nineteenth century: all gone, but in a good cause. It is only our more ambivalent age, engaged in the very last mopping-up of the great wet waste that challenged our ancestors, which has begun to question whether the price of progress has been too high. We can see more clearly now that the ultimate end of such a process – the flood entirely tamed – is both impossible and undesirable. The long, and still unfolding, history of land drainage contains much that is progress in the best sense: the combating of diseases and terrifying floods and the production of food to sustain a growing population. But it is also a saga of human avarice and the abuse of power.
Quite apart from the major wetlands, every valley bottom below a certain contour line must have been soggy and at times impassable. Quite how wet any particular locality once was can often be guessed through detective work involving an enjoyable study of plants, place-names, and local history. At Henley-in-Arden in Warwickshire, two churches face each other across the little river Alne. Their presence is explained in an appeal of 1548 to retain both churches: ‘The town of Henley is severed from the Parish Church with a brook which in winter so riseth that none may pass over it without danger of perishing.’ Nearby, in the tell-tale peat, are stands of meadowsweet and sedge, the last remnants of Henley’s ancient marsh, now happily salvaged as an oasis within a new housing estate.
In other places, canals have provided a damp lifeline for plants surviving from much earlier wetlands. In the 1950s the redoubtable Eva Crackles, a Yorkshire teacher, was gathering grasses at the point where the Leven canal crosses the site of an ancient lake, now long vanished, but clearly just surviving when the canal was cut in 1802. There, 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
