willow scrub of the Wealdmoors in Shropshire, the local rector described in 1673 how ‘the inhabitants commonly hang’d bells about the necks of their cows that they might the more easily find them’.11 Otmoor was notorious as a place in which to get lost, and verses celebrate how the curfew rung on winter nights from Charlton church guided travellers out of the intractable moor. Fog, the one element which no drainer can ever quite banish from the marshes, still rolls out over Otmoor. A farmer’s wife giving evidence at the Otmoor M40 inquiry in 1983 described how she had once become completely lost in one of her own fields while counting sheep. Daniel Defoe describes the Fens shrouded in fog, through which nothing could be seen ‘but now and then the lanthorn or cupola of Ely Minster’.12 To further terrify lost, wandering travellers, igniting marsh gas created the alarming phenomena, still not fully understood by scientists, known as will-o’-the-wisps, jack-o’-lanterns, or corpse-candles.13 Perhaps the gloomiest wetland in literature is the Slough of Despond in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in which the protagonist Christian sinks under the weight of his sins. Bunyan was a tinker’s son from Bedford and he is thought to have been inspired by ‘Soul’s Slough’ near Tempsford where the Rivers Ivel and Ouse often must have bogged down travellers on the Great North Road. The flooded meadows can still be seen from the A1 trunk road in winter but sadly, as yet, there is no Slough of Despond Site of Special Scientific Interest.
‘Infect her beauty,/ You fen-sucked fogs,’ inveighed Shakespeare’s King Lear against his daughter. Our ancestors associated wetlands with disease. They had good reason. As late as 1827, travellers were ‘fearful of entering the fens of Cambridgeshire lest the Marsh Miasma should shorten their lives’.14 On the Somerset Levels, inundated by heavy floods in 1872 and 1873, a report described how ‘Ague set in early in the spring and is now very prevalent … among the poorer families who are badly fed and clothed.’15 ‘Ague’ was malaria, meaning literally ‘bad air’, the marshy miasma which, until the discovery of the malarial mosquito in 1880, was believed to be the main cause of the disease. Mosquitoes that carry malaria breed far north into Europe and were responsible for many deaths. Malaria was endemic in the English wetlands. ‘As bad as an Essex Ague’ was a common expression;16 and in the 1870s the garrison at Tilbury Fort was changed every six months because of the prevalence of malaria. The Thames marshes ensured that the ague was carried into the courts of kings, who were less resistant to it than the hardy people of the fen. James I was declared by his contemporaries to have died of it, and his victim Sir Walter Raleigh, awaiting execution in the Tower, prayed that he would not be seized by a fit of ague on the scaffold, lest his enemies should proclaim that he had met his death shivering with fear.
The terror, if not the actuality, of the disease has survived into our own time. In the early 1970s Strood District Council was spraying the dykes in the North Kent Marshes with DDT as a precaution against malaria. Malaria is caused by parasites transmitted from an infected person to another person in the saliva of a mosquito’s bite. Therefore, if there are no people with malaria from whom it can be transmitted in a given area, the disease dies out, as it did eventually in England. For the same reason, the commonly voiced concern that modern wetland creation schemes may bring back malaria can be discounted in the UK.
As towns grew larger, they began to pollute the adjacent marshes and valley bottoms, which in turn developed ominous reputations for disease. Bubonic plague is not directly associated with water, but the rats which carried it arrived by boat at riverside wharves. The Great Plague of London is said to have broken out in 1665 in a marshy district known as the Seven Dials, and it was especially prevalent along the old river Fleet. In the nineteenth century the stagnant waters of cities were haunted by the shadow of cholera. It is no accident that many slums were built on marshes: Mosside in Manchester, the Bogside in Londonderry, and much of the East End of London, where the suffix ‘ey’ to many of the place-names tells us that they were islands in Saxon times: Hackney, Stepney, and, most notorious of all, Bermondsey, where, in the 1850s, the river Neckinger, ‘the colour of strong green tea’, flowed round Jacob’s Island, which was used by Dickens as a setting for Oliver Twist, and was described by him as ‘the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London’. Social reformers were not slow to describe the horrors of such places. Friedrich Engels singled out the river Aire in Leeds and the Irk in Manchester for special mention: ‘In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depth of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable.’17 A hundred years later George Orwell described the stagnant pools of the Ince flashes at Wigan as ‘covered with ice the colour of raw umber … nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water.’18
Add to this the limitations that wetlands impose on farming – short grazing seasons, foot-rot in sheep, suppression of root growth in the damp soil, and the hazards of high water for cereal crops, not to mention the terror of a flood – and it is enough to make one want to rush out and drain all remaining wetlands on sight. Certainly, it is easy to understand why drainage was regarded as a major manifestation of progress. But there is another side to the story. It is a curious fact that the poor benighted people who were unfortunate enough to live in the rural wetlands did not seem to share the prejudices of their visitors at all. Celia Fiennes, in high disgust at finding ‘froggs and slow-worms and snailes in my roome’ when lodging in Ely, had the honesty to qualify her personal dislike for the place, which ‘must needs be very unhealthy, tho’ the natives say much to the contrary which proceeds from custom and use’.19
THE HARVESTS OF THE WETLANDS
It really was exasperating to observe how the natives seemed to like their marshes. William Elstobb found the eighteenth-century fen dwellers content with ‘uncomfortable accommodations’;20 and Vancouver wrote of Burwell in 1794: ‘Any attempt in contemplation for the better drainage of this fen is considered hostile to the true interests of these deluded people.’21
Back in 1646, one of the few articulate defenders of such deluded people maintained that those who would undertake drainage ‘have always vilified the Fens, and have misinformed many Parliament men, that all the Fens is a mere quagmire … of little or no value: but those which live in the Fens, and are neighbours to it, know the contrary.’ The anonymous author of The Anti-Projector proceeded to list the bounty of the fen. There were horses, cattle, fodder, sheep, osiers, and reed; and ‘Lastly, we have many thousand cottagers, which live on our Fens, which must otherwise go a-begging.’22
Such people knew how to make the watery wilderness yield up its riches. Pre-eminent among the benefits was summer grazing. The very word ‘Somerset’ (Sumorsaetan) is Anglo-Saxon, possibly meaning ‘summer dwellers’, those who came down to graze the levels in summer-time. It is thought that those who occupied the Malvern hill forts may have herded their cattle down the Worcestershire drove-ways to pasture them on Longdon Marsh in the summers before the Roman conquest. Shortage of grass in high summer was a continual problem in the open-field system of the Middle Ages. No such lack of lush pasture afflicted the Fens, especially in the silt belt, where medieval prosperity is commemorated by mighty churches and confirmed by historians’ research into medieval and sixteenth-century tax returns. It was the flood itself that often ensured the rich grazing. The commons of the Isle of Axholme lay under water from around Martinmas (11 November) until May Day. As the inhabitants were to inform the people who set out to drain these wetlands in the seventeenth century, this flood brought with it ‘a thick fatt water’. After drainage had removed this regular winter flood, the people were left with ‘thin hungry starving water’, which rendered the land incapable of supporting the large grazing herds which it had formerly sustained.23 Even now, local farmers around Axholme regard the ‘warped land’ which was deliberately flooded with silt as the best land in the region.
The
