Celebrating World Wetlands Day
February
1st marked World Wetlands Day, with events run up and down the
country - Here Mark Everard takes a brief look at,
“Water meadows: nostalgia and sustainability”
Water meadows may
evoke a long-gone rural idyll, immortalised by Thomas Hardy’s
novels and the paintings of John Constable, and indeed few remain
in operation today in the modern intensive agricultural landscape.
Yet water meadows were once an advanced technology widespread
across much of southern England. They date from around 1580,
spreading rapidly and prevailing for over 300 years before their
precipitous decline in the 20th century. To endure so long in
a pre-industrial age, they may just hold clues about sustainable
land use.
Structure,
function and operation
Water meadows are quite distinct from other forms of wet grassland.
Engineered topography, weirs, channels, sluices and sloping
‘panes’ of grass enabled a management regime that
maximised productivity. The operation of water meadows required
considerable skill from the ‘drowners’ who used
to tend them and control the flows, sequentially flooding (or
‘drowning’) and draining the meadows throughout
the year to maximise early growth of grass and the production
of hay and summer grazing. The control of flows harnessed the
warmth and nutrient-bearing silt from river water, using it
to irrigate and control some weeds. This method of controlled
water flow, critically maintaining a thin film of moving and
oxygenated water that is not allowed to stand and waterlog the
soil, distinguishes water meadows from other forms of wet grassland.
The
rise and decline of water meadows
One of the prime benefits of water meadows was to overcome the
so-called ‘hungry gap’ in April, when winter feed
had been eaten and the new grass was yet to emerge. This was
the principal limiting factor to livestock production, the whole
agricultural economy, and its capacity to feed the population.
Stock feeding on the hay and early grazing provided by water
meadows were often moved to the thinner soils of surrounding
Downs at night, their manure and faeces boosting production
of cereal crops under the ‘sheep-corn system’. Water
meadows spread almost wherever appropriate catchment topography
and free-draining soils occurred, though their heartland was
throughout the chalk catchments of Wessex.
Their
heyday was the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thereafter,
increasing mechanisation, chemically-intensive farming, rising
labour costs, international trade and the declining contribution
of agriculture to the British economy consigned them rapidly
and almost completely to history throughout the twentieth century.
Today, only a handful of water meadows remain in operation.
Dr
Mark Everard, Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West
of England
Dr
Mark Everard is the author of the new book Water Meadows: Living
Treasures in the English Landscape (2005, Forrest Text, Ceredigion).
The book explores water meadows from historic, economic, ecological
and heritage perspectives, charting their origins, function
and operation, decline and fall, but always from functional
and sustainability perspectives. It also provides case studies
of operational systems and abandoned systems, and is comprehensively
illustrated with both photographs and line drawings.
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Sluice gate
on head main at Lower Woodford |
