Draining the Peat Fens south of the Wash, England

Abstract

From 1649, the peat Fens were drained by gravity and the project was declared successful early in the 1650s. A decade later the lands had become wetter and the project was in trouble. Vermuyden, and everyone else involved was surprised. The easy modern explanation is that Vermuyden, whose scheme it was, would have been experienced in taming the sea and marine and fluvial sediments, coming, as he did, from the Netherlands, the leading nation for land reclamation and drainage. It is generally accepted that he and his contemporaries could not have been expected to know that drained peat degrades and gravity drainage ceases to work. However, a fact that has generally been overlooked in the relevant literature is that large areas of peat in the Netherlands had been drained over centuries from around AD 800. The Dutch experience was complex, including land drained but then lost to the sea by AD 1250 and then drained again, from about 1450. By the seventeenth century, any memory there may have been of peat wastage had been lost. The paper begins with a brief account of seventeenth-century peat drainage in England, followed by the Dutch experience, including the use of drainage windmills from about 1450. This leads to a discussion of the time taken for windmills to become common in England as an example of technology transfer and the need for appropriate administrative arrangements. There is an appendix on peat.