REWT
Rivers of England and Wales, Temporally
The Fens
Where the standard method fails on first principles, and the modern channel says least.
Research leads, not verified citations, except where marked verified.
Why the modern channel is worthless here
Everywhere else in England the modern river is a modified version of the older one. In the Great Level it is not: the seventeenth-century cuts are new channels on new lines, the old watercourses were abandoned rather than improved, and the peat surface they ran across has since wasted by several metres — so even the terrain no longer records where the water went.
The scoping exercise measured the consequence directly. Before the Fen drains were excluded, it routed 17.8 m³/s of the Great Ouse at 1348 down the Hundred Foot Drain (1600), the Old Bedford (1631) and the River Delph (1651), because no pre-1348 channel in the network reached the sea. The medieval answer — the Wellstream and the Old Croft River — was drawn on the map and connected to nothing.
That is the failure mode this region produces: not an obviously wrong line, but a confident number carried down a channel that did not yet exist.
The schemes, and when
| period | scheme | note |
|---|---|---|
| Roman | Car Dyke; the Fenland lodes (Reach, Burwell, Wicken) | verified — premodern exceptions, not to be swept up as post-medieval |
| c.1490 | Morton’s Leam, cut by Bishop Morton | verified — late medieval, and within this project’s period |
| c.1490 | Bevill’s Leam | verified |
| 1600s | piecemeal work under Commissions of Sewers | |
| 1631 | Vermuyden’s Old Bedford River — the first Great Level cut | verified, 31.8 km |
| 1651 | New Bedford / Hundred Foot River; the Forty Foot, Sixteen Foot, Delph | verified — the Adventurers’ works under the fourth Earl of Bedford |
| 18th–19th c. | steam drainage; Vernatt’s, Counter, North Level Main Drain | |
| 1964 | the Cut-off Channel and Relief Channel | verified — twentieth century |
Contemporary and near-contemporary
- Jonas Moore, A Mapp of ye Great Levell of ye Fenns (1658) — the most immediately actionable cartographic source in the whole project: a survey of the Level as the works were being carried out. It survives in several forms, including sheets at The National Archives and a single-sheet reproduction, and georeferencing control points for it were already curated during the scoping exercise.
- Dugdale, The History of Imbanking and Drayning (1662) — the contemporary account of the Adventurers’ works, with maps. Shared with the Humber.
- Wells, The History of the Drainage of the Great Level of the Fens (1829) — a documentary history of what was cut and when. Identified and unexploited.
Modern scholarship and survey
- Darby, The Draining of the Fens (1940) and The Changing Fenland (1983) — verified, and the authority for most of the datings above.
- The Fenland Survey — Hall and Coles, Fenland Survey: An Essay in Landscape and Persistence (1994) — verified for the lodes, and the model for what a systematic wetland survey yields: roddons, buried channels and settlement, mapped.
- Roddon mapping. The silt-filled beds of the pre-drainage watercourses stand proud of the wasted peat and are visible from the air. They are the single best physical evidence of the medieval network anywhere in England, and no attempt has yet used them. High-resolution terrain data covers them; the scoping exercise proved the extraction on one channel and went no further.
Cartographic and land-record
- Adventurers’ allotments and the drainage awards. As in the Humber, land was taken in exchange for the drainage, and the exchange had to be mapped.
- Enclosure and tithe maps. Available, but under end-user agreements that bar redistribution — usable to inform a judgement, never to travel in a published file.
- Sea level and the coastline. Transcribed Holocene relative sea-level curves for the Wash exist, and the medieval shore here runs kilometres inland of the modern one. It is treated as a measurement to be drawn, never a filter to clip the network with.
What to do here first
Trace the Wellstream and the Old Croft River, from Moore 1658 and the roddon evidence. Note that this is one of the few places where the work may already exist: the navigable waterways GIS carries the Well Stream as a feature on its own course, a median 1.4 km from any modern watercourse — traced, though not openly published, and not at the resolution a six-inch trace would give. They are the medieval outfall of the Great Ouse, the reason the seventeenth-century cuts have to be excluded, and the single largest hole in the reconstruction.