To the River (19 page)

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years before the birth of Christ, the first early humans wandered in from what is now Europe, travelling by foot across the land bridge that would later be obliterated by the rising seas of the English Channel. At first these humans left no lasting traces on the landscape, but by something like 4000
BC
a change in the valley’s pollen record shows that the wildwood was beginning to be cleared. Pollen is a remarkable record of man’s activity. In addition to exhibiting a great variety in architecture and ornamentation, it is unusually resistant to decay and can be preserved for millennia if trapped in acidic or waterlogged soil. Samples retrieved from peat at the base of Mount Caburn suggest the Downs were covered then by a dense lime forest that was gradually being coppiced or cut down by early pastoralists and farmers. Pollen from the cereals they cultivated has also been preserved, invisible to the naked eye, within the dark lenses of peat deposited by the river.

Time inched on. The wildwood disappeared, tree by tree, as forests have a tendency to do. The Romans came and went, leaving their urns of ash, their rational roads. Lewes was built in the Saxon era, on a grid pattern with narrow flint-walled twit-tens dropping away from the high street. A market was held there, and two mints; sometimes the skeletons of its inhabitants are found by metal detectorists in the hills nearby, curled like cats with their swords at their sides. Most of the villages I could see strung out along the river like beads on a rosary – Iford, Beddingham, Rodmell, Southease and Tarring Neville – were named in the Domesday Book and had been established long before the Normans came and built their castles, and filled them, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it,
with devils and evil men
.

In this dark, almost ungraspable period the lower Ouse was in all probability a vast tidal estuary, much wider than it is today and edged with vagrant, half-illusory channels that riddled through the mudflats. The river passed on its meandering way to the sea through salt marshes full of wild birds, which were themselves flanked on either side by fertile alluvial soil built up into terraces by centuries of silt deposition. The Saxons were a seafaring people and it seems from the records of Domesday that those who settled here were engaged in the herring industry, sailing to the North Sea spawning grounds to catch the teeming sea-coloured fish in drift nets, for the tithes these tiny hamlets produced equal those of some of the richest East Anglian towns.

Marshes mark the boundary between land and sea, and marsh dwellers earn their living in both directions. In Rodmell they made salt, cooking it from cakes of silty soil in coarse ceramic pans known now as briquetage, while at Iford there were two watermills, both long since tumbled down. The villages also depended on farming, but even this owed a debt to the river, for it seems that though the high downland was used for pasture, crops were grown lower down, on the alluvial slopes, while the hay to feed oxen through winter was harvested from the dank meadows that lined the water’s edge.

By the end of the Saxon era the practice of reclamation known as inning was prevalent in England’s marshes, and it seems likely from the abundance of meadows recorded in the valley by the Domesday scribes that it had begun in earnest here by the time King Harold was killed on the bloody fields of Battle, not twenty miles away. With his death time snaps into focus, for if the relics of the Saxon era are fragile or have a tendency towards corrosion, those of the Normans are more solid and abiding. The tower I stood upon had been assembled by Norman hands, and if I looked south I could make out the priory they also built, which was once the size of Canterbury Cathedral and was ruined not by time or weather but as a consequence of Henry VIII’s cataclysmic break with Rome.

After the Conquest marshland began to be more systematically reclaimed, and what happened in the Ouse valley is matched by work across the country, including the Somerset Levels, Romney Marsh and the Lincolnshire and Norfolk Fens. During this period ditches were dug to dry the land, and in time walls, banks and sluice gates were also built to pen the rivers in. Ironically enough, these works often had the opposite effect. The beaches of the English Channel are subject to longshore drift, the term given to the movement of shingle by the prevailing wind and tide. These shifting beaches have a tendency to close up the mouths of rivers, but before the marshes were inned their formation was countered by the fact of tidal scour. Estuaries tend to carry a considerable quantity of water, and on the ebb tide this great flux of liquid rushes through the river’s mouth, scraping away the gathering glut of stones. With the drainage of the marshes this scouring power was inevitably reduced, and by the early medieval period a drifting shingle spit had forced the mouth of the Ouse from its natural exit at Newhaven three miles east to Seaford. As a result, the river began to take an increasingly tortuous course, and at the same time to slowly fill with silt.

From the beginning of the clearance of the forests, thousands of years before, the river had suffered from sedimentation, and now, as it grew progressively more shallow, so it became increasingly vulnerable to damming by reeds and waste, meaning that spring tides or heavy rains led almost inevitably to the banks being breached. With such conditions, it’s not perhaps surprising that by the late Middle Ages much of the valley was underwater either permanently or when tides were high. The land was barely above sea level, and a marsh is after all a marsh not out of spite or stubbornness but because it’s situated where water collects. Upper Rise and Lower Rise, the two odd tumps of greensand that stand in the centre of the Brooks, were in that period rabbit-infested islands, and most of the cow-grazed fields I could see from the castle would have been wishes, from the Old English
wisc
or marshy meadow: at best waterlogged, at worst submerged. As for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who owned 400 acres near Southerham, he shrugged his shoulders and converted his fields into a permanent fishery: bream being more amenable to submersion than corn or sheep.

Then there was the matter of the weather. In the Roman period the sea level was a good six feet lower than it is today, and the Sussex coast probably extended a mile further out. By the Middle Ages, the sea began to rise again, causing intense problems for coastal villages. With the rising tides there came upon Europe a period of terrible storms, and it was during this time that the towns of Winchelsea and Dunwich began to vanish beneath the waves. The unrest persisted in brief cycles for more than a century and a half, and can be tracked through faltering harvest records and the anxious chronicles of the monasteries.

The destruction caused by these storms could be considerable. One of the most severe took place in the spring of 1287, when Edward I had come to the throne and was working to expel the nation’s Jews. By morning the sea had completely rearranged the eastern Channel coast, landlocking some towns and turning others into harbours overnight. The town of Old Winchelsea, which had been broken up piecemeal by the sea for decades, was conclusively drowned that day, and if anything remains of its two churches and fifty inns it is hidden beneath the massive sweeping expanse of Broomhill Sands, where the kite surfers like to play.

Something had to be done, and in 1422, in the wake of the infamous St Elizabeth Flood, which devastated the south coast and took perhaps five thousand lives in the Netherlands besides, the first Commission of Sewers was appointed for the Ouse. These bodies were gradually becoming prevalent in marshy regions and they functioned as a kind of water police, investigating ‘the annoyances and defects of repairs of sea-banks and walls, publick streams and rivers, ditches and marsh-grounds’. In 1531 an Act of Parliament granted the commissions extensive powers as guardians, empowering them to collect a tax from landowners known as a scot, and to use these funds for the upkeep of their region’s drainage. Furthermore, persistent misdemeanours could be tried in special courts, which had the right to order fines by way of punishment.

I’d seen in the county archive at the bottom of the hill some of the account books and records kept by the local commissioners of sewers, written in a multitude of hands and upon a multitude of papers. The earliest records are lost, but though the quill gives way over time to the typewriter certain words are repeated through the centuries until they take on almost the appearance of an incantation or a prayer. Over and again I read
cast, cleanse, widen, draw, raft, shoreset
: in other words dredge out weeds, dig clear the clotted bottoms of sewers and reinforce the embankments where they have begun to crumble and slip, that we may grow our crops, God willing, in the land we have wrung from the river.

But it was the Devil’s own job, draining that valley. You might as well have used a sieve. Around the time that Lord Thomas Cromwell was engaged in tugging down the nation’s monasteries he received a letter from Sir John Gage, one of the local commissioners, that gives a sense of how desperate local people were becoming. ‘The Levell of Lewes,’ he writes, ‘yet be in great rewyn and continually under water in winter, and for the most parte lykwyse in somer . . . my Lord Prior of Lewes sailed to Flanders to view and see things there . . . also we sent for him that inned the Marshe beneathe Saynte Katherins, and had his advise.’

By 1539 the needs of shipping as well as farming had become pressing, and so the commission decided that a channel should be cut through the shingle spit to force the river back out at Newhaven. This allowed the barges hauling Wealden iron and wool to reach the sea without running aground, but it didn’t take long for the shingle to build up again, for though a pier was put up it was unaccountably set on the eastern side of the river and so did nothing to prevent the shingle, which drove in from the south-west.

It took the Georgians, those rational thinkers, to puzzle out what needed to be done. In the mid-eighteenth century, after another series of floods and an abortive experiment with lock gates near the river’s mouth, which were rapidly pulled down for want of repair, a civil engineer was invited to view the valley. John Smeaton came fromYorkshire, began as an instrument maker and shifted by degrees into becoming the foremost engineer of the Industrial Age. Over the decades he designed bridges, harbours, watermills, lighthouses and canals; even a diving bell. His very first engineering contract had been to drain the boggy reaches of Lochar Moss, and the problem of turning fens and marshes into profitable land would occupy him throughout his life. As a young man he’d travelled to the Low Countries to research hydraulic drainage, applying the tricks he learnt there years later to the three great fens of his native county: Potteric Carr, Adlingfleet Level and Hatfield Chase. By the latter part of the eighteenth century Smeaton was much in demand as a drainage expert and during the damp June of 1767 he was asked by the commissioners to survey the Ouse.

His proposals were ambitious. One plan was to build a canal alongside and sometimes underneath the Ouse that would conduct excess water directly to the sea: a prohibitively expensive scheme. The other, cheaper, suggestion was to straighten the river by a series of cuts, dredging it clear and building up the banks until it resembled and functioned like a canal, with a gated outfall sluice at the river’s mouth that would prevent the tide from rushing in. It was this latter plan that found favour, but in keeping with the air of hesitation and haphazardness that seemed to attend all work on the river, the work proceeded only haltingly for the next twenty years.

Another engineer, William Cubitt, took a brief look at the project, but it was William Jessop, the son of a shipwright, who finished the job, as he was often to do with Smeaton’s schemes. In 1787 Jessop was asked to re-survey the river, and armed with his plans a group of local traders and landowners took the matter to parliament. The ins and outs of what followed are excessively complicated, but by 1791 the Lower Ouse Navigation Act was passed and a little later Jessop submitted his final scheme – closely resembling Smeaton’s – for draining the Levels and making the river navigable for trade. A few hundred workers were employed and, steadily, steadily over the next ten years the river’s more tortuous curves were sliced away, the banks rebuilt, a breakwater flung up at Newhaven and the channel widened and dredged so that it ran both swift and clear. Barges no longer ran aground at Piddinghoe, unable to ship their cargoes of coal, salt, fruit and slate upstream. Instead, it was the river that was imprisoned, compelled to remain within the reinforced banks that the navvies built: at a cost, by the century’s end, of nearly £20,000.

Did matters end there? Of course not. The lower river may have been canalised, but it still remained at risk of fluvial flooding when rain or surge tides overtopped the banks. One of the worst came in 1852, when the rains were so great sheep drowned in the fields, train lines were impassable, and harvests of hay and corn were beaten to the ground and rotted where they lay. There was another in 1960, of comparative severity to the 2000 flood, though it caused less damage, for in that period the floodplain hadn’t yet filled with the housing estates and supermarkets that clutter it today. As for the defensive work, though the duties of the commissioners have long since been absorbed by the Environment Agency the old techniques of casting and shoresetting have not yet been abandoned. The banks are still raised and braced, the vegetation dragged away, work that in 2008 was estimated to cost £410,000 a year, for labour is dearer now than it was two centuries ago.

I leaned my chin on the wall and gazed down at the network of ditches, glinting in the light like fishing lines. The river turned its curves, for though its crookedness had been corrected, it was never made entirely straight. For the last ten years, I’d laboured under the impression that this view was almost natural, and now I felt a fool. Landscapes, we all agree these days, are palimpsests, laid down in layers over the centuries. While this is undoubtedly correct, it’s also true that some eras work in pencil and others in indelible ink. The river bore the signature of the Industrial Age; its previous character might be discernible but it cannot be retrieved.