REWT Rivers of England and Wales, Temporally

The rebuilt landscapes

The source programme in Evidence is general. Where it has to be worked out in detail is the handful of landscapes whose hydrography was rebuilt rather than modified — and in which, therefore, the modern channel is the weakest evidence of a premodern course.

A tenth of England lies inside an Internal Drainage District: 12,779 km of mapped watercourse, 13.3% of the network. That is the measurable extent of the problem, and these pages divide it up.

The Fens	where the standard method fails on first principles, and the modern channel says least
The Humber	densely dated, legally documented, and a river sent an entirely different way in 1626
The Somerset Levels	where medieval work survives in the network, and generic rules are weakest
Other regions	the Broads, the Trent, Romney Marsh, the mosses, and the rest

Research leads, not verified citations. Items marked verified were checked against a copy during the scoping exercise. The rest are a reading list, and this project’s own rule is that a row without a verified source is not evidence. Dates given as decades are firmer than dates given as years.

What connects them

In every case the question is the same and the answer is local: which channels are older than they look, and which are engineering? National pattern rules — dating a channel by whether it is called a drain, a cut, a sewer — answer it crudely and should admit as much. Each region below has a literature that answers it properly for that region, and the work is to bring those answers into the dataset one region at a time.

Which is also why phased release matters: no edition need wait for all of them.