How the Fens Were Drained: The Story Behind the Flat Landscape

Visitors to Wisbech who look out across the flat fields and straight waterways of the surrounding countryside are looking at one of the most ambitious engineering projects ever undertaken in England. The Fenland landscape is almost entirely artificial: before the drainage works of the seventeenth century, the area was a vast, largely waterlogged wilderness of marsh, reed beds, and shallow lakes, periodically flooded by the sea and by the rivers draining from the Midlands and the East. The fertile black fields that now stretch to the horizon were created by human ingenuity, over decades of difficult and contentious work.

The Undrained Fens

Before drainage, the Fens were not empty. They supported a distinctive way of life based on fishing, fowling, peat-cutting, and grazing on the seasonal commons. The Fenland communities who lived in this waterlogged landscape had adapted to it over centuries, developing the skills and knowledge needed to navigate and exploit an environment that was hostile to outsiders.

These communities were fiercely resistant to drainage. The Fens as they existed supported their livelihoods; drainage would transform the land in ways that would primarily benefit outside investors and landowners. The "Fen Tigers," as the local resisters became known, wrecked drainage works, filled in ditches, and attacked drainage workers throughout the seventeenth century in a prolonged campaign to defend their way of life.

Cornelius Vermuyden and the Bedford Level

The decisive phase of Fenland drainage was led by the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden, acting on behalf of the Earl of Bedford and a group of investors known as the Adventurers. The project began in the 1630s, when King Charles I gave his support to the scheme with the incentive that the Crown would receive a share of the drained land.

Vermuyden's approach drew on Dutch experience of land reclamation from the Low Countries, where he had worked before coming to England. The key innovation was the construction of straight drainage channels to carry water away from the Fens to the sea. The Old Bedford River (dug 1630-1637) and the New Bedford River, also known as the Hundred Foot Drain (dug 1651), ran roughly parallel for twenty-one miles across the Bedford Level, creating a drainage system of unprecedented scale.

The two rivers created an area of washland between them - deliberately left to flood in winter as an overflow for excess water - and drained the land beyond. Wisbech, at the mouth of the River Nene, sat at the outflow point of a drainage system that covered hundreds of thousands of acres.

The Problem of Shrinkage

Drainage solved one problem but created another. The peat soils of the Fens, when drained and exposed to air, began to oxidise and compact. The land sank. Fields that had been drained to just above sea level sank below it. Water that had previously flowed away by gravity now needed to be pumped upward before it could drain.

This problem became severe by the early eighteenth century, and the response was the windpump - a drainage windmill that lifted water from the low fields into the drainage channels above. The Fens were dotted with hundreds of windpumps by the mid-eighteenth century. Steam pumps replaced them in the nineteenth century, and electric pumps handle the work today. The Fens remain below sea level in many areas, and drainage is an ongoing, continuous process that must never stop.

The Agricultural Transformation

The land that drainage created proved extraordinarily fertile. The peat and silt soils of the reclaimed Fens were rich in the nutrients that crops needed, and the flat, open landscape was suited to the large-scale arable farming that became increasingly profitable as urban populations grew. The Fenland became the breadbasket of eastern England: wheat, barley, potatoes, sugar beet, and eventually the soft fruits and peas that would make Wisbech a centre of food processing in the twentieth century.

This agricultural wealth funded the Georgian prosperity that is written in stone along North Brink and Museum Square in Wisbech. The fine townhouses, the brewery, the bank, the museum: all of these are ultimately funded by the fertility of the drained land.

The Landscape Today

The Fenland landscape around Wisbech is one of the most distinctive in England: flat, wide, and open in a way that the rest of lowland England rarely is. The great skies that have drawn painters to the area since the nineteenth century are a direct consequence of the flat terrain. The straight waterways - drains, rivers, and lodes - that cross the landscape at right angles are the visible structure of the drainage system that keeps the land productive.

Driving or cycling through the Fens outside Wisbech is to move through a landscape that is both ancient in its essentials and entirely modern in its form. The fields, the drains, the pumping stations, and the banks of the embanked rivers are all part of the same centuries-long project of keeping the sea and the rivers at bay. It is a remarkable landscape, and understanding its origins makes it considerably more interesting.