The revoluTion in agriCulTure^103never discussed as such is a reminder that very few people really believe that
all of England’s native wildlife should be protected and encouraged in the
wild.
In some cases, especially in the north and west of England, the drainage
of wetlands was less problematic for wildlife. The vast fens of the Somerset
Levels, for example, partly reclaimed in the seventeenth century, were
systematically eradicated following a series of parliamentary enclosure acts.
In the 1770s, the Brue valley began to be drained and between 1780 and
1800 the valleys of the Axe and Cary were reclaimed. The north levels –
between the Mendips and the Severn estuary – were enclosed and largely
drained in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and the south
levels – the valleys of the Parret, Tone, and Yeo – between 1810 and 1840.^56
These ambitious programmes involved the construction of a number of new
arterial channels, as well as the cutting of many hundreds of minor drainage
ditches.^57 The drained land was not put to the plough, however, but instead
divided into small pasture fields, bounded by drainage dykes lined with
pollarded willows: a landscape which remained attractive to wetland birds,
and rich in aquatic plants and invertebrates. Many other western wetlands,
such as the carrs of north Shropshire, reclaimed between 1750 and 1850,
likewise remained largely under grass. But some of the great mosses of
Cheshire and Lancashire, drained in the first 40 years of the nineteenth
century, were – like the fenlands of the east – converted to arable.^58 The
observations made by Coward and Oldham following the drainage of
Carrington Moss, the last major reclamation of this kind, in 1886 provides
some indication of what was lost. Previously the area had comprised:
Six hundred acres of moorland... the haunt during the breeding season
of the Red Grouse, Short-eared Owl, Curlew, Common Snipe, and Twite.
An interesting instance of the change in bird life wrought by cultivation is
exhibited in the rapid colonising of Carrington Moss, after its reclamation,
by the Common Bunting.For the most part, as here, wetland drainage in the nineteenth century was
an environmental disaster, reflected in the marked declines in the numbers
of once common birds like the bittern, marsh harrier, ruff and black-tailed
godwit, clearly apparent in nineteenth-century county avifaunas, as well as
in the loss of large numbers of wetland plants documented in successive
surveys, in Cambridgeshire especially.^59
new fields and hedges
While large-scale reclamation and ‘improvement’ clearly had adverse effects
on wildlife, it might be thought these were partly offset by the innumerable