Whittlesey Mere Reparations
If I get sleepy behind the wheel and drive off the road, I may get away with it if I land smoothly in a nice dry field. But if I veer across the road and kill someone I’m in trouble. Manslaughter trouble, prison probably. The causes are the same, the actions the same, but what makes it a crime is the result. I’ve been wondering if this is also true of environmental crime. We would all agree that the destruction of the Amazon rainforests is a crime, committed by people who understand that they are causing irreparable damage that is deplored around the world, who are well aware that humanity condemns the way they put their own enrichment before the good of the planet. But the damage of the past is much more difficult to judge, and may have been carried out by people who convinced themselves that they were doing good, or that they were bringing progress. They may have thought they were ‘civilizing’ the landscape in some way, maybe letting in bright Christian light where there had been dark forests symbolising evil or sheltering demonised creatures like the wolf. Or they may have justified to themselves their theft of land from the common people, who had worked it in common from time immemorial, by saying that they would farm it more efficiently if they enclosed and possessed it. The story of the slow degradation of our environment is too complex to be easily judged when it took place in a past where ideas and opinions were different. The monastic sheep runs that I suspect greatly accelerated the deforestation of our uplands were organised by monks who thought they were working for the glory of God. On the other hand the Highland landowners who forced the clansmen off their ancestral lands and into exile in order to graze sheep on the mountains cannot have justified their actions so easily to themselves, although the way the sheep accelerated deforestation might not have been so obvious to them.
The instance of gross historic environmental damage in Britain that stands out most clearly for me is the draining of Whittlesey Mere in the Cambridgeshire Fens. The story of the drainage of the fens – maybe the greatest ecological catastrophe in Britain, at least until the recent adoption of chemical farming - is part of the story of the enclosure movement. Where older land-use systems were based on land being shared and used by whole communities, even where some Lord of the Manor had an overall role in the working of the system, the enclosure movement sought to dismantle this system and place the land in the ownership of the most powerful people in the communities, usually the people who could organise parliamentary enclosure bills that formalised and sought to legalise their theft of what had been communal land with shared usage rights since Saxon times, or maybe even earlier. The people of the open field villages used and shared cultivated strips of land, common land, and ‘waste’, and enjoyed certain rights in woodland too. Very little of this remains, apart from a few vestigial lowland commons, and also much of our upland grazings and moorlands, which weren’t worth stealing, and are therefore often commons to this day. But however unjust the enclosures were, in the villages of central England they may not have been environmentally damaging, although some species may have increased or decreased somewhat, and heathlands may have gradually been taken into cultivation.
Water could also be a common, where commoners might have fishing rights. The fens of Cambridgeshire were overwhelmingly common land and this included the open water as well as the marshes and reed beds. The fen people were independent, working duck decoys, fishing, cutting reeds and grazing their stock on fenland that once covered 1500 square miles, and I have a sense that their independence and the wild ‘uncivilised’ nature of the area was seen as somehow subversive and threatening of the social order. The move to drain and enclose this landscape was enthusiastically supported by King Charles the First, and areas of fenland were given to the Gentlemen Adventurers like the Duke of Bedford who were the venture capitalists of their day, to drain for their benefit and perhaps, in their terms, in the national interest. The fen people were furious at having their lifestyle and livelihoods and common rights taken from them, and tried to sabotage the drainage schemes, and the carrot fields of Cambridgeshire bear witness to their failure to uphold their rights against an overweening state and the power of the aristocracy.
At the centre of the fens lay Whittlesea Mere, the largest lake in lowland Britain, maybe five or six miles by two or three. The figures are vague because the mere was vague, imperceptibly merging from open water to reed beds and bogs and marshy grazings, with a water level that varied according to the weather and how much water the fenland rivers could carry away. The mere and the fens around it were naturally fertile, fed with lime-rich waters that flowed in from the uplands to the west, and provided livings to many fen settlements, but little in the way of rents and taxes, although that the monks of Ely enjoyed an annual rental of 27,150 eels attests to the productivity of the mere. It is said to have had its own inland ports and fishing fleets, operating from 15 ‘boatgates’ at the time of drainage, and the activities of the fen commoners were regulated by their own traditions as much as by the manorial courts. One duck decoy took 2,400 ducks in a single week. The Cole brothers were able to pay the lord of the manor £700 annually for rights to wildfowling, fishing and reed cutting, and in one particular year -1851- the bundles of thatching reeds stacked at Holme were valued at £1300, the equivalent today of £150,000. The skies must often have been darkened by migrating waterfowl and waders, and the reed beds sniving with water rails and warblers, bitterns, coots and the like. As in the Amazon rainforest, this was a place of extraordinary richness and value to its inhabitants, but not a place which brought much value to the aristocracy and the powerful who wanted to translate its intrinsic value into cash value, and pocket that cash. In hindsight it is clear that the commoners were conserving the environment and husbanding the resources just as the Amazon tribes do, although the advocates of enclosure tended to characterise them as wild and disorganised, or to compare them to the Cherokee; and in contrast the enclosers – the drainers, in this case – were only interested in the soil, which they have since exploited almost to destruction.
Whittlesey Mere to the very end was also a pleasure resort, with sailing and rowing boats, and regattas. In 1774 Lord Orford organised a boating holiday in the fens, taking a train of five boats towed by the Whale, a sailing vessel, leading two accommodation boats for his guests and one for the crew, and one a floating stable with a horse for towing the fleet on the narrow river sections of the tour where sailing was impractical. They spent four days on Whittlesey Mere. Its value as a lake was huge, for its produce, its centrality to the ancient local economy, and for the emerging pleasure and tourist industry. From a modern perspective, the lake and the reed beds and fens that surrounded it were of inestimable value in the ecology not only of East Anglia but of the whole of Europe, as well as being a massive carbon sink. And although they protested the locals were defenceless against the local gentry, led by William Wells of Holme, six of whom started to take possession of the riches of Whittlesey in the 1840s. The enclosure movement always modified the local ecology, but nowhere was it as drastic as in the fens and in the fens nowhere as drastic as at Whittlesey. Much of England became a complex hedged landscape after enclosure, but at Whittlesey the rich and complex wetlands were turned into a monotonous sterile landscape comparable with the worst of American industrial farming. And the drainage was undertaken by men who knew it was the pretty much last wild fenland, who took advantage of the very latest steam pumping technology to get it drained as fast as possible, using a machine demonstrated at the Great Exhibition, and they celebrated their actions with a massive party while tons of dead fish rotted on the old lake bed. This was not gradual attrition of the environment but a deliberate and dramatic act. At the time it was a clear injustice in the way it destroyed the rights of the fenland people, and from our modern perspective it was, I suggest, perhaps the most significant ecological crime in our history.
I found the loss of the fens disturbing even as a child hearing stories about Hereward the Wake and the impenetrable fens surrounding the Isle of Ely. The idea of a place so wild that kings, and even teachers, couldn’t get at you if you knew the secret pathways, was attractive, and still is. The idea of wild places is exciting, and wild places should mean places where humans tread with care and difficulty, which may be why rewilding has become such an attractive idea. And so it may not be surprising that for much of my life the regret at the loss of Whittlesey Mere has included a dream that it could be recreated. And at this point in history I suggest that the arguments in favour have never been so good.
We can take for granted, I think, that Whittlesey Mere, even when the fens around it were being drained, was still in the 1840s a world-class wetland habitat. We don’t know exactly the numbers of creatures and species that thrived there, but it is certain that it was part of the life support systems of migratory birds and fish from all over Europe as well as being incomparably rich in native species, some of which became extinct when the mere was drained. Waders and geese would have darkened the skies there in spring and autumn. To visit fen remnants like Wicken Fen can give one a hint of the profusion we have lost, although even there the depredations of the modern chemical farming all around have sadly dissipated the wildlife that was there when I used to go there in my twenties.
Some kinds of landscape restoration are slow and laborious. Many new woodlands will still be little more than trees in a field in years to come. But fenland and lakes can be restored very quickly, because many of the fenland plants and trees grow fast, and the soils may contain viable seeds of fenland plants. There is a very creditable recreated fen near Alconbury that was carrot fields quite recently.
The present government recently announced its Environmental Land Management scheme as part of the post-Brexit farming and environmental changes. One of the pillars of this policy is Landscape Restoration. In a fenland where the fields have been flat and square and largely treeless sometimes for hundreds of years, and are now more than ever sterile sprayed monocultures, if landscape restoration is to have any meaning it must mean restoration of fens, and in fact the ELM proposals mention peatland restoration as a specific objective. Peatland restoration has a precise meaning – it means returning the land to a wet condition so that the peat can start to build up again. It does not mean simply halting the damage. Since the fens were drained the peat soils have been dried out and pulverised, oxidised and simply blown away. The main man who drained the mere drove a now-famous post into the peat at Holme which graphically demonstrates that we have lost so much of the precious peat that the ground level is now 4 metres lower than it was when the Mere was drained. In many places the wasted peat barely covers the underlying clays which were there when the fens started to form after the last Ice Age, and the future agricultural value of the fenland farms must be in doubt. And we are starting to devise a new way of accounting for the countryside that takes account of values other than those of the farmer. We are acutely conscious now, for instance, of the value of peat as a carbon sink, and of land use that retains water and reduces flooding. We are also now starting to express the value of such things as recreation, mental health, air quality and a thriving ecology in financial terms. We may know that lying in a wildflower meadow with one’s beloved, watching swallows hawking overhead, is not a joy one can express in cash terms, but we know we must find ways to account for the value in the landscape of things other than the farmer’s profit and loss figures, and to set these other values in their proper place against them.
In 2010 Natural England published a report researched by Cranfield University, on the management of lowland peatland for environmental reasons, which attempts just such calculations. In a very detailed analysis of possible ways of managing remaining peatlands, it concludes that while some farming systems can conserve remaining peat, only taking peatlands out of agriculture results in actual peatland restoration. Their calculations show that setting the value of arable cropping and the cost of agricultural subsidies on peat fenlands against environmental costs of farming there gives an annual benefit from ending agriculture of £200-£500ha/year, while the average benefits associated with ecosystem services on restored peatlands probably range between £550 and £2000ha/year. They also conclude that the impact on food security would be negligible, and that the depletion of the peat soils is continually reducing their importance as food producing areas. Another study, led by academics at Cambridge University together with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), suggests that the economic benefits of protecting nature-rich sites such as wetlands and woodlands outweigh the profit that could be made from using the land for resource extraction, according to the largest study yet to look at the value of protecting nature at specific locations. The study concluded that the asset returns of “ecosystem services” such as carbon storage and flood prevention created by conservation work was, pound for pound, greater than man-made capital created by using the land for activities such as forestry or farming.
Having said all that, to move people from the area in order to recreate a Mere might be seen as politically difficult, and buying out householders might be expensive, although this constructive project would probably cost less than HS2 and deliver more sustainable benefits. Many objectors from the farming community argue as standard for the need to produce food, which, as Tony Juniper has pointed out, rings a bit hollow in a nation which puts 30% of its food unused into the bin, especially from farmers in an area where the deep rich peat soils have been almost destroyed by profligate farming methods. Many of the conservation projects in the area appear publicly to confine themselves to an interest in rewetting land, and to mild changes in land use and farming practices in order to conserve nature, although there are more more ambitious fenland restoration schemes such as the Great Fen project, but the fact that the local wildlife trust appears now to own the entire lakebed of Whittlesey Mere suggests that they may have plans for which they feel the public is not yet ready. Those who are ambitious enough to wish to see the Mere returned to us as part of serious reparations for the environmental catastrophe that is fenland farming may nevertheless see their wish granted. The nearby Holme Post marks the lowest place in the fens, 2.75 metres below sea level, and the loss of the fenland peat has returned the land towards the profile it had when the water released by the melting ice sheets of the last Ice Age engulfed it. Now once again the melting of Antarctic ice sheets and glaciers threatens such sea level rises that large areas of the fens may well flood again. The re-flooding of Whittlesey Mere may come about, ironically, as the result of our more general failure to look after the planet. There does not seem to be a seriously coherent plan to defend the fenlands from rising sea levels, and there may be either a tacit acceptance that re-flooding of parts of the fens is inevitable, or a very British short-term politics may result in a failure to take the issue seriously and plan effectively enough to prevent it. Either way we may see Whittlesea Mere reappear in some form when rising sea levels impede the working of the sluices or overtop the dykes as they did in 1952. In the meantime I suggest a complete planning embargo on the whole area of the former mere while conservationists get their ducks in a row.
Some sources:
http://www.cambsgeology.org/great-fen-holme-fen-and-whittlesea-mere
https://www.fensforthefuture.org.uk/admin/resources/downloads/lowland-peatland-restoration-study.pdf
https://www.greatfen.org.uk/wild-fen
The Fens, Discovering England’s Ancient Depths, Francis Pryor, 2019
England’s Lost Lake: The Story of Whittlesea Mere, Paul Middleton, republished 2018
The Lost Fens: England's Greatest Ecological Disaster by Ian D. Rotheram, 2013
I love the notion that what is at present a simple landscape could become a place of complexity and mystery too. With the forthcoming ban on the use of peat in gardens it's time to reduce the extent that peat soils are burnt, oxidised, or allowed to blow or wash away too.