REWT Rivers of England and Wales, Temporally

Other regions

Landscapes substantially altered, ordered roughly by how much of the network is affected. Shorter than the three preceding pages because less is known here — which is itself the finding.

Research leads, not verified citations.

The Norfolk Broads — and the reason they matter most

The Broads are medieval. They are flooded peat cuttings, dug from perhaps the twelfth century and inundated in the fourteenth as sea level rose — which makes them almost the only large water bodies in England that a reconstruction at a medieval date must show as forming, rather than as later intrusions to be removed.

This is also where the scoping exercise was worst: the Bure (92.7 km) and 83% of the Broads unreached, with a hand-authored connector that attached correctly at both ends and still carried nothing. The cause was never found, and it is on the list for the rebuild.

Sources: the Broads Authority’s own historical work; Lambert and Jennings, whose mid-twentieth-century research established the peat-digging origin; and the Norfolk Historic Environment Record.

The Trent valley

A wide, actively migrating floodplain with extensive palaeochannels, and the receiving water for the Idle, the Dove and the Derwent — three of the rivers on the scoping exercise’s dead-end list. Alluvial geomorphology here is well studied and wholly unexploited. The Humber Wetlands Project’s Ancholme and Lower Trent volume covers the lower valley; see the Humber.

Romney Marsh

A reclaimed coastal wetland with an exceptional research literature and a well-attested medieval hydrography, including the Rhee Wall and the diversion of the Rother after the storms of the 1280s — a documented medieval river re-routing of exactly the kind this project most wants and most lacks. Eddison and the Romney Marsh Research Trust volumes are the way in. The caution about sewer names applies here as in Somerset.

The Lancashire and Cheshire mosses

Martin Mere, Chat Moss and the surrounding peat, drained from the seventeenth century and heavily so in the eighteenth and nineteenth. This is the hinterland of the Cheshire and south Lancashire basin that cost the scoping exercise most of a day — the Weaver, Irwell, Gowy and Mersey — and where the modern channel is a drainage engineer’s work.

The Hull valley and Holderness

Covered by the Humber page’s later statutory schemes (Holderness Drainage 1764, Beverley and Barmston 1798, Keyingham c.1802) and by the Humber Wetlands Project’s Holderness volume. Listed separately because its drainage is eighteenth-century rather than seventeenth, and so belongs to a different documentary record.

The Severn estuary and the Vale of Berkeley

Coastal reclamation with a long medieval history and a good literature — Rippon again, whose comparative work covers the Severn levels alongside Somerset.

The Lincolnshire coastal marshes and the Wash silts

The siltland between the Fens proper and the sea, reclaimed progressively from the Roman period. Relevant to where the medieval coastline actually ran — which this project treats as a measurement rather than a filter: the coast is drawn and reported, and never used to clip the network.

The Thames

Not a rebuilt landscape, but worth a line because of scale: tidal reaches, extensive embankment from the medieval period, and the largest flows in the dataset. The scoping exercise found tidal reaches to be the class with the highest rate of flow anomalies — 4.6% against 0.9% for inland rivers — which is unexplained, and may be a sampling artefact at the tidal limit rather than a topology fault.