Читать книгу Taming the Flood: Rivers, Wetlands and the Centuries-Old Battle Against Flooding - Jeremy Purseglove - Страница 23

In 1795 Parliament voted that King George III award Elkington £1,000 to carry out a survey of his achievements. It was in the reign of ‘Farmer George’ that drainage became more than ever in vogue, ‘improvement’ being all the rage. In the eighteenth century this word had two meanings, basically different faces of the same coin. ‘Capability Brown’, and later Repton were employed to ‘improve’ the beauties of the grounds around country houses. It seems curious that for all those hard-riding, hard-drinking squires, the eternal search for a status symbol should have taken the form of building temples to nymphs and dryads. Nonetheless, the universality of this practice is attested by one wit who told Brown that he would like to die before him, so that he could have a look at heaven before Brown ‘improved’ it. The other meaning of the word, still current in farming circles, is to intensify agricultural production. This form of improvement no doubt helped to pay the fees of Brown and Repton, along with all the other bills. Invoking a doctrine of the ‘spirit of place’, they felled ancient woodlands and drained the marshes. Villages were razed to the ground, so that they did not disrupt the view from drawing-room windows, with the same enthusiasm with which the peasantry on the more distant corners of the estate were dispossessed of their wetland commons in the pursuit of productive farming.

The environmental contradictions implicit in all this activity scarcely occurred to anyone, of course. Sir Joseph Banks, the greatest naturalist of the age, founder of Kew Gardens and botanist-companion to Captain Cook, first developed his boyhood passion for natural history in East, West, and Wildmoor fens, which washed up to the foot of the Lincolnshire wolds, and so to the very gates of Revesby Abbey, the Banks’s family home. In his old age, Banks presided over the destruction of these fens, supporting the drainage projects of John Rennie, according to the Farmer’s Magazine of February 1807, against ‘a party of uninformed people, headed by a little parson and a magistrate’.³⁸ His portrait hangs in the place of honour in the Boston office of the Anglian Water Authority.

Another botanist, William Roscoe, founder of Liverpool botanic gardens and commemorated by the genus Roscoea beloved of alpine gardeners, actually bankrupted himself as a result of a drainage scheme.³⁹ In 1793 Roscoe began work on Trafford Moss, part of the mighty Chat Moss, 2,500 acres of sphagnum, sundew, and bog asphodel. Roscoe’s ambition was to drain the whole wetland, and to this end he organized ditching, marling, and importation from nearby Manchester of boatload upon boatload of human ordure, which was forked by hand on to the moss. One of Roscoe’s ideas was a windmill plough, whose sails would actually churn up the bog. Unsurprisingly, in view of such projects, he was financially ruined, and his interest in Chat Moss was bought out by 1821.

No one was worse at making connections about the consequences of his actions than William Madocks who reclaimed the coastal marshes of the Traeth Mawr in North Wales.⁴⁰ His embankment across the Glaslyn estuary was completed in 1811 amidst much rejoicing and ox-roasting, only to collapse the following year. After its final reconstruction, it was to bear the main road and railway out of Portmadoc, named in honour of its founder, who, with sublime inconsistency, passionately espoused the fashionable ideals of picturesque landscape. The man who rammed a causeway across the front of the finest prospect of Snowdonia was actually given to carving breathless verses to the water sprites on the river cliffs at Dolgellau. As he imposed his geometrical grid of drainage ditches across the newly filled-in estuary of the Traeth, it occurred to Madocks for a brief, but anxious, moment that the whole project resembled ‘Dutch gardening’; but in no time the poet Shelley arrived to help him with his endeavours, declaiming on the ‘poetry of engineering’. Only one man could see the situation clearly: Thomas Love Peacock, who described the scenic effect of Madocks’s project in his novel Headlong Hall: ‘The mountain frame remains unchanged, unchangeable: but the liquid mirror it enclosed is gone.’⁴¹