(^34) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
peat digging) and extensive reed and sedge beds. Many contained a range of
other habitats including areas of wet woodland, although the spread of alder
and other trees was kept in check by the intensity of grazing and cutting, while
the numerous watercourses contained a diverse range of fish, including vast
numbers of eels. Diversity was also encouraged by the regular disturbance
of the surface by peat digging and the subsequent, gradual terrestrialization
of the resultant pools. Indeed, some of the rarer wetland plants, such as
the Fen Violet (Viola persicifolia), are still closely associated with former
peat diggings.^73 Fens teemed with invertebrates, including butterflies like
the black hairstreak, the swallowtail – now confined to a few locations on
the Norfolk Broads – and the now extinct large copper. All provided food
for birds like the coot, moorhen, little grebe, mallard and teal, water rail
and spotted crake, redshank, godwit, lapwing and bittern, all present in
vast numbers. These in turn were predated by hobbies, sparrowhawks and
red kites. In Newbold’s words, ‘the local population unwittingly sustained
and managed the fens in what would be regarded today as a large nature
reserve’.^74
By the 1630s major attempts to drain the fenlands of eastern England
were under way, the result in part of major legal changes. The General
Drainage Act of 1600 allowed local common rights to be overturned and
investors in major land improvement schemes to be rewarded with a share
of the lands reclaimed.^75 The most important project was the draining of
the southern Fens of East Anglia, or the ‘Great Level’, by a consortium of
‘Adventurers’ (investors) headed by the Duke of Bedford, who employed
the Dutch Engineer Cornelius Vermyden. This project culminated in the
construction of the two parallel artificial watercourses, the Old Bedford and
New Bedford Rivers, which ran for some 25 kilometres, but never more
than a kilometre apart. They were designed to speed up the flow of water
coming down the river Ouse into the Wash. The two watercourses were
embanked, the strip of land between them acting as a linear reservoir for the
winter floods.^76 Today, much of this long, narrow area of unimproved and
seasonally flooded grassland forms the Welney bird reserve.
The ‘Great Level’ was finally declared drained, after many difficulties
and much opposition from local commoners, in 1653. Some of the land
was allotted to the adventurers and major landowners but much remained
as common land, albeit now better drained, and divided between the
parishes which had formerly shared it. But Vermyden and his associates
underestimated the extent to which the drying peat would shrink and, when
ploughed within the enclosed parcels, would degrade through microbial
action and blow away. The land surface began to fall, and the Fens were
subject once more to seasonal flooding. Hundreds of drainage windmills
were erected by private owners to improve their land, but with limited
effect. Pastures had been improved, and the area under reeds reduced, but
the final draining of the fens, both in East Anglia and elsewhere, had to wait
until the nineteenth century.
elle
(Elle)
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