Читать книгу Taming the Flood: Rivers, Wetlands and the Centuries-Old Battle Against Flooding - Jeremy Purseglove - Страница 14

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 likelihood, unless, as at Longdon Marsh in Worcestershire, the traveller was able to pay a guide to show the way across. On the swampy 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