When was the fens drained

There was further flooding in , especially in Lynn. Fenland was clearly an area with plenty of wind, as the windmills and pumps of previous ages demonstrated. This is something that can be exploited in the twenty-first century. Wind turbines of various sizes have already been erected across the area, and the Fens will increasingly supply the electricity used in England and Wales.

A short history of the Fens. The Fens have always been a unique part of England: few places today retain an individual character but Fenland certainly does. For many hundreds of years, they were regularly under water for a great part of the year: they were therefore mainly pastoral economies, supplemented by fishing and fowling.

However, where arable land was available it was often extremely fertile. The Fens were inhospitable to outsiders, partly because of disease: marsh ague was very common and traditionally countered by the use of opium.

The Market Place in Boston. Fleet Church with its detached tower. Draining the Fens The Fens — also known as the Fenlands — are a natural marshy region in eastern England.

Difference draining the Fens has made The lowland drainage schemes of John Rennie and his contemporaries turned large areas of marsh land into farmland. How the work was done In local government officials in Lincolnshire asked engineer John Rennie for advice on dealing with waterlogged lands around the river Witham. Versions of both the relief and cut-off channels had been proposed by John Rennie in Fascinating facts Since the 19 th century the Fens have been known for a traditional form of ice skating known as fen skating.

More about this project gov. Explore more civil engineering projects. Tower Bridge. Kishore Ramdeen Civil Engineer. Dominic Cronin Civil Engineer. Andy Mitchell Civil Engineer.

Anusha Shah Civil Engineer. John Smeaton Civil Engineer. Sakthy Selvakumaran Civil Engineer. Bryn Noble Civil Engineer. Left alone, the Fens grow over with a dense, brushy scrub vegetation known locally as carr. It seems, however, that medieval Fenland vegetation consisted of vast beds of sedge and reed, with willow and grasslands in the drier spots and ponds in the wetter spots.

These ecosystems are not natural; they are human-induced and must be harvested regularly to avoid the transition to carr. People were in the Fens from the start, exploiting the resources and shaping the environment.

The Fenmen were a tough breed - stubbornly independent of the aristocracy, known to keep to themselves and resent outsiders. They found a good living, made better by tax avoidance, by fishing, catching waterfowl, trapping eels, coppicing willows, and other marsh trees, making baskets, taking peat for fuel, and harvesting sedge and reeds.

Peat harvest was important in the same way, and the peat beds were left to restore themselves. In all, the Fens probably pumped as much net value into the medieval economy as the same amount of farmland. Early monks liked the Fens for their solitude and set up a series of abbeys and monasteries on clay islands that rose above the general marsh.

They probably knew better. The greatest of these foundations was at Ely from Eel Island , a foot hill of clay deposited on a limestone outcrop, a veritable mountain rising from the Fens. Founded as a monastery in , Ely became a cathedral in The massive cathedral sits like a crown around the hilltop, with the town climbing down its slopes to a delightful small quay on the River Great Ouse pronounced, fittingly enough, ooze.

Ely remains and thrives to this day, and its 14 centuries of history sit kindly upon it. With the Reformation, Henry VIII seized the great Fen foundations and gave their property to his pals and supporters—none of whom actually lived in, or knew anything about, the Fens. While the monks knew how to keep the Fenmen happy and the tithes flowing, the new owners did not.

Truth be told, it took a brave and foolish man to enter the Fens with the intent of collecting money from Fenmen. This happy state for the Fenmen lasted for years. It was Charles I who broke up the party. In the king granted the fourth Earl of Bedford the right to drain 95, acres traversed by the Rivers Nene and Great Ouse, stretching from Ely well to the north.

Bedford, along with 13 fellow investors known as the Gentlemen Adventurers, hired the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to work on the project from to , with time off for civil war.

Vermuyden understood that the flooding rivers clogged the Fens with deposits and set about fixing that by straightening their channels. A straightened river would rush its flood-waters right past the Fenlands, scour its channel and dump its sediment harmlessly into the Wash.

In the largest of many projects, Vermuyden diverted the Great Ouse into two parallel channels running straight as a ruler—an amazing flood control structure 20 miles long and 1 mile wide. When floods became too great for the two channels, the mile space between them would store the excess waters.

At the end of their mile run, the channels intersected and rejoined the Ouse at the start of tidal waters, where a sluice could hold them back at high tide and release them at low tide to scour the channel.

Vermuyden, however, assumed that the local fields could be easily drained into this and similar channels by gravity. It had built up, as it always does, and would rot away as soon as it was drained and exposed to air. By the early 18th century, the Fens were once again flooded. The rivers of the Welland, Witham, Glen, Nene, Cam, Great Ouse, and Little Ouse made of the fens a vast inland waterway navigable only in shallow-bottomed boats, the forerunners of today's punts.

The fens were rich in sea life; in the monk William of Malmesbury declared, "Here is such a quantity of fish as to cause astonishment in strangers while the natives laugh at their surprise". The most common fish in the fens were eels, which were not only caught and eaten but used as currency! Rents, debts, and tithes were often settled by payment in eels. In addition, the fens have always supported a vast variety of birdlife. Dwellers in the fens harvested reeds, peat, and rushes for sale, and so essential were these natural materials to the economy of the area in medieval times that their harvest was carefully regulated by local landowners.

The Romans schemed to drain the fens, but they got no further than building the Car Dyke to keep the sea at bay. The Saxons founded a series of isolated monasteries on islands in the fens.

Ely is one such island, and its name is a reminder of the area's rich sea life; Ely translates as "island of eels".

Crowland Abbey is a good example of an isolated Saxon monastery site.