sevenTeenTh-CenTury environmenTs: farmland^39upstream fed water into channels (‘carriers’ or ‘carriages’) which ran along
the tops of parallel ridges, superficially resembling the ‘ridge and furrow’
of former arable fields. The water flowed down their sides and into the
‘furrows’, which returned it to the river (Figure 7).^8
Floating was quintessentially a practice of the Wessex chalklands, and
by 1750 almost all the main river valleys in this region were managed in
this way. By the end of the eighteenth century there were said to be between
15,000 and 20,000 acres (6,000–8,000 hectares) of watered meadow in south
Wiltshire alone;^9 while in Hampshire it has been suggested that ‘during the
eighteenth century, in particular, water meadows must have been pushed to
the limits of areas where it was possible to construct them’.^10 The elaborate
systems then established – mostly ‘bedworks’ – remained in widespread use
into the nineteenth and, in many cases, into the twentieth century. They
have left impressive archaeological traces over many thousands of hectares
of valley floor. Only a handful of examples, including that at Britford near
Salisbury, are still in use. Floating was also common in parts of Shropshire
and Herefordshire, in Devon, and the Cotswolds.^11 It was more sporadically
employed, and generally with less success, in the central, northern and
eastern parts of the country.^12
Modern historians studying water meadows tend to emphasize the
warming effects of the water in winter, and its irrigating properties
(counteracting any soil water deficiency) in the summer. But contemporaries
also emphasized the improvements that lime and suspended nutrients
brought to the quality of the sward, while recent studies have suggested
that floating also altered its composition. It favoured plants which are
figure 7 A water meadow being ‘drowned’ at Charlton-all-Saints, Wiltshire, in
the 1930s.