Man cannot live by marsh alone, therefore he must needs live marshless. Progress cannot abide that farmland and marshland, wild and tame, exist in mutual toleration and harmony.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1948
The autumn of 2000, the year we stumbled into rewilding, turned into the wettest since records began in 1766. The skies that had blackened over the farm sale at the end of September had advanced a chain of convective storms that stalled over the south-east of England in early October, bringing days of downpours, culminating in a terrific deluge on the night of 11 October. Plumpton in East Sussex, eighteen miles south-east of Knepp, had been hardest hit, receiving 156.4 millimetres of rain in forty-eight hours. Combined with the high spring tide and aquifers already full after three wet years, the water had found nowhere to go. Twelve major rivers in Sussex and Kent, including the Ouse, Cuckmere, Arun and our river, the Adur, burst their banks. Ditches filled; storm drains burst; roads became rivers; streets and driveways sped the rain into tributaries of the gathering flood.
Downstream, coastal towns were inundated. In Lewes the water rose from ankle deep to six foot in less than half an hour. Rush-hour motorists clambered onto the roofs of their cars. Firkins floated out of the devastated Harvey’s brewery, bobbing off down the streets, ramming against walls and front doors in a bizarre parody of the barrel-rolling tradition of bonfire night. Emergency services were scrambled, with the army and volunteers drafted in to shore up defences around Lewes, Tunbridge Wells, Maidstone, Shoreham, Littlehampton, Newhaven and Medmerry, near Chichester. Lifeboats evacuated people through their downstairs and even upstairs windows. In Uckfield, a lifeboat rescued twenty nightshift workers stranded in a supermarket, and a shop owner, swept away by the flood down the high street, was lifted to safety by helicopter.
The Adur, like its sister rivers the Ouse and the Arun, was quickly overwhelmed. At Knepp, the canalized stretch of the Adur that runs for one and a half miles from Capps Bridge past Old Knepp Castle and under the A24 swelled into a 150 acre lake stretching from Shipley to Pound Farm. Sheets of water swept down our floodplain, swirling around the embankments of the old castle, recreating the twelfth-century moat. The torrent crashed over the weirs and roiled into the culvert under the dual carriageway. The village lane by Tenchford was breached and at Floodgates, water began lapping at the edges of the A24. In a moment of madness, encouraged perhaps by a sudden burst of sunshine between downpours, we took to the flood in the little rowing boat from the lake. Marooned voles and field mice were clinging to fronds of vegetation as the water rose around them. We were too concerned with navigating the eddies and currents to heed them. We swung off, inches above a submerged barbed-wire fence, just short of the A24, pulling the boat up onto the causeway of the old castle, thankful not to have capsized.
As November approached, storms continued rolling over from Western Europe, venting their worst on Shropshire, Worcestershire and Yorkshire. Peak flows on the Rivers Thames, Trent, Severn, Wharfe and Dee were the highest for more than fifty years. The River Ouse in Yorkshire rose eighteen feet – the highest level since the seventeenth century. Inches away from being deluged, sixty-five thousand sandbags defended the city of York. It rained, continuously, for three months. Between September and November an average of 503 millimetres fell across the whole of England and Wales, exceeding the previous record by 50 millimetres. Weather-related insurance claims for the autumn of 2000 totalled £1 billion. In all, in 700 villages, hamlets and towns across Britain, 10,000 homes were flooded.
As farmers throughout our county kissed goodbye to their winter crops (insuring against crop loss is prohibitively expensive for most farmers), worried about the cost of buying in extra feed for animals deprived of autumn grazing and – worse – agonized over the drowning of sheep and cattle, we realized the full implications of our escape from farming. Authorities declared this a 1-in-200-year event. The Environment Agency, however, with uncanny timing, published a report on 10 September 2000, announcing that climate change had made Britain a hotspot for flooding. The risk to lives and property would increase tenfold over the next century. The south-east of England, it warned, was likely to see more sudden intense thunderstorms. Flooding of low-lying areas was increasingly likely, due to an anticipated rise in sea level of 15–50 centimetres this century, as Arctic glaciers continue to melt. The frequency of dangerously high tides would rise from once a century to once a decade, threatening even flood-defence structures as formidable as the Thames Barrage.
In the aftermath of the storms local MPs, local authorities and devastated householders pressed for funding to shore up flood defences. They called for levees along river banks and for raising existing levees with more boulders to keep rivers in their channels. Rivers must be dredged, they urged, revetments built and remaining meanders straightened to carry floodwater faster out to sea. Major roads needed to be raised, bigger storm drains installed and reserve electrical supplies buried underground, out of the water’s reach. The cost would be high. But, it was argued, cheap at the price of protecting lives, businesses, infrastructure and property. There were universal outpourings of frustration and indignation, a sense of a battle lost for lack of reinforcements. The water had got away with it – this time. But the war was yet to be won.
Controlling flows of water is a war humans have been waging the world over, ever since they first began draining land for agriculture and improving rivers for navigation. In Britain, the Romans flung themselves at land drainage, cutting the Car Dykes in the Fens and the ditches of Romney Marsh among many others. But it was the Victorians who took hydrological engineering to its zenith.
Eighteenth-century canals – 4,800 miles in all – saw the blossoming of waterways that would, until eclipsed by the railways in the 1840s and 50s, serve as the commercial arteries of the nation. By the mid-nineteenth century canals criss-crossed Britain, linking ports and navigable rivers with inland industry. In West Sussex even small rivers like the Adur were adapted for barges carrying coal, sand, gravel and salt upstream, and timber, grain and produce downstream. In 1807 the River Adur Navigation Act permitted local agencies and landowners ‘to cleanse, scour, enlarge, widen, deepen and render more straight, the Current of the said River . . . so as to maintain a more effectual Navigation for boats, Barges, Lighters, or Vessels drawing three feet of water’.
The works exceeded expectations and within three years barges drawing four feet were using the improved channel. Wharves were dug at two termini, with another added in 1811 for importing lime, chalk and coal. Fifteen years after completion, the Adur canal was extended to West Grinstead by widening and dredging the shallow stream to the north of Bines Bridge. The canal was extended again under an Act of 1825, widening and straightening the stretch from Bines Bridge to Bay Bridge on the Horsham to Worthing Road – a project that took five years. Two brick locks were built, large enough to admit craft up to seventy feet long – one near West Grinstead church where the early Burrells are buried, and the other near Lock Farm at Partridge Green. Another wharf was created at Bay Bridge at the terminus near the Burrell Arms, just short of the old Knepp castle, together with a basin in which the barges could turn before heading back downstream.
It was no mean feat to render the Adur navigable even for shallow vessels. By the nineteenth century, the Adur was a ghost of its former self. Long ago, during the reign of Edward the Confessor, it had been a powerful tidal river, carrying large ships inland as far as Steyning, six miles south of Knepp. The name Adur is thought to come from the Celtic word ‘dwyr’ meaning ‘flowing waters’. Barges had plied the river as far as Shipley, exporting iron and timber to the coast. In Shipley church, built by the Knights Templar, where modern generations of Knepp Burrells are buried, an ironstone mooring bollard recalls the draught boats that would have carried pilgrims and soldier-monks off to the crusades. In the early thirteenth century, King John used ships to transport the great oak timbers from Knepp Forest thirteen miles down to the estuary to reinforce his defences at Dover.
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though, erosion caused by longshore drift along the coast shifted the mouth of the Adur eastwards, away from the run of tides and the prevailing wind, creating a shingle bar that impeded the flow of tidal water. Though salt water was still reaching old Knepp castle in the 1530s the volume had fallen away dramatically. The reclamation of tidal marshes by a process called ‘inning’ (throwing up embankments around the marshes and installing one-way drains) exacerbated the silting up of the estuary, and the old port at Bramber had to be moved four miles downstream to Shoreham on the coast.
With the loss of the powerful effects of the tide, the flow of the Adur was limited to whatever freshwater trickled into it. There are few natural springs in our part of the world and most streams and rivers rely almost entirely on rainwater run-off. To make the Adur navigable again the Victorians had to ‘cleanse, widen, and deepen the Sewers, Cuts, Streams, Trenches and Passages for water leading into or towards the said river, and to alter and change the course thereof by new Drains, Trenches, or Passages, where the same may be expedient for securing a good and effectual Drainage of and through the said Levels and Low Lands.’
It was a process that was being enacted across the length and breadth the country. For the Victorians, land drainage was a win-win situation. It supplied the means by which shallow, slow-flowing rivers and canals could be used for transport and it made land available for agriculture. With the population of Britain doubling in just fifty years, from 9 million at the time of the first census in 1801 to 18 million in 1851, the race was on to find land to produce more food. The canalization of our stretch of the upper reaches of the River Adur, west of old Knepp Castle, was part of a colossal nationwide effort, stimulated by interest-free, short-term loans from the government to landowners, to improve the land for agriculture.
Sir Charles Merrik Burrell, first occupant of the new Knepp Castle built by Nash, was one of the most vociferous proponents of land drainage. On 16 May 1845, he appeared before a Select Committee of the House of Lords to give evidence on the merits of Pearson’s draining plough – an invention that was revolutionizing his estate at Knepp. In the twelve years since he had started using Pearson’s plough, Sir Charles said, the Home Farm’s yield of wheat had increased from five sacks per acre to seven or eight, and in some cases nine. He could now grow ‘White Belgian Cattle Carrots and very good Swede Turnips . . . this in a District where, when I first took Land in hand in 1803 and 1804, no Farmers in the Neighbourhood attempted to sow Turnips of any Kind, except in their Gardens for domestic Use.’ His observation reveals how different the soil must have been, how much richer the organic matter. Had he gazed into a crystal ball, after a hundred and fifty years of ploughing, he would see land where growing vegetables is again unthinkable.
But back then there was fertility to be unleashed, and the principal obstacle was drainage. The wonder plough was the brainchild of Mr John Pearson, a farmer on a hundred acres of sodden Weald clay in Kent. His land was clearly much like Knepp’s, ‘very wet and stiff’, with no fresh springs and yet the water ‘caused by the rain and snow is held on the surface of the ground, owing to the retentive quality of the clay beneath, which hinders it sinking away’. Without artificial drainage, crops came late in the summer when the sun had evaporated the surface water, and even then they were scant. Wheat crops could be grown only about twice in every seven years, with the land remaining fallow in between. Draining, if it could be done at all, was carried out ‘by Hand with Frith or Bushes at much Expense’ – digging trenches and filling them with rubble, twigs and branches.
Pearson’s invention, pulled by six (Sir Charles recommended eight) draught horses, pioneered a way of excavating drains two foot below ground. This was far more efficient than trying to drain water off the surface by digging open ditches and grips by hand, and it helped prevent the run-off of topsoil and manure. Draining the clay soil went beyond increasing the potential for arable and other crops. Drier pastures eradicated foot rot in livestock and reduced the expense of buying winter fodder since animals could be turned out to grass earlier in the spring and remain out several weeks longer in the autumn. The drainage plough had considerable impact on human wellbeing, too. ‘The Health of my Farmers and Cottagers, with their Families, has been much improved’, Sir Charles told the committee, ‘so that Agues, which had been common, no longer prevail, and low Fevers also have greatly diminished.’ Landowners, he urged the committee, must encourage their farm tenants to use this plough and install tiled drains and outfalls on their land. He was, himself, making pipe tiles (the cylindrical clay pipe was invented in 1810) in the clay brickworks at the centre of the estate, to gift to any tenants wishing to drain their holding. A statute in 1826 had already exempted from duty ‘those bricks and tiles made solely for draining wet and marshy land – provided they are legibly stamped in making with the word DRAIN.’ A large number of people could be employed installing drains, he added, and this ‘has been a very great Inducement to me to do it, because it has kept the Poor off the Parish. I have employed sometimes Two Ploughs going, and the Work that each Pearson Plough will do at a fair Morning’s Work will require Twenty-two Hands to fill it up by Night.’
The commercial effect of land drainage on the countryside was incalculable. On Kent and Sussex clay it also opened up possibilities for roads that would, for the first time in history, be viable all year round. Between 1847 and 1890 thirteen separate Land Improvement and Drainage Acts were passed and nearly £16 million – £1.44 billion in today’s money – was spent on land improvement in Great Britain. In the Burrell archives, loan agreements and repayment schedules chronicle the enthusiastic take-up of the schemes at Knepp which, at some point, included the canalization of our stretch of the upper reaches of the Adur. By November 1875 Sir Charles’ son Percy Burrell had taken up his father’s baton and was subject to three charges under the Public Money Drainage Act, two under the Lands Improvement Company’s Act, and six under the General Land Drainage Company’s Acts. A further £1,529 14s 2d charge was made the following year for drainage, grubbing and road-making on the Estate. In all, he borrowed £8,000 – half what it had cost his father to build the castle. Further loans, mainly to continue the drainage work, were taken out by his son and heir, Sir Walter, in 1877, 1879, 1880, 1883 and 1884.
By the second half of the nineteenth century another plough was making waves. John Fowler, a young agricultural engineer from a Quaker family in Wiltshire, moved by witnessing firsthand the horrors of the Irish potato famine, devoted himself to inventing ways of reducing the cost of food production. In 1851 he exhibited his new drainage ‘mole’ plough at the Great Exhibition – a horse-powered winch-driven machine that could tunnel drainage channels three feet six inches deeper than Pearson’s and avoid digging large, messy trenches. By 1852 he had replaced the horse-drawn winch system with a coal-fired steam engine and the industrial revolution began transforming the countryside. Between 1840 and 1890, 12 million acres of land were drained in Britain, most of it made over to agriculture.
Until we sold it in 2000, we used the same basic mole plough, now pulled by tractor, in our fields whenever they showed signs of waterlogging. The torpedo-shaped ‘mole’ is mounted on a steel plate suspended from a frame. The frame itself is pulled along a few inches above the soil, with the steel plate beneath it slicing a thin cut through the surface. Beneath the steel plate, the mole torpedo cores through the clay, smearing and compacting the sides of its tunnel into a smooth, hollow tube – in effect, a drain without infrastructure. Our neighbours still use a mole plough every ten to twenty years or so, maintaining a lattice-work of ducts running between ditches and above the main drainage pipes.
In other respects, too, British farmers today have simply maintained, and sometimes improved, the drainage systems the Victorians put into play. Canals have had their day as commercial transport systems. But they are still maintained so they can receive water drained off the land by the intricate networks of ditches and underground drains. And so it flows from canals and rivers, out to sea. When the Victorian drainage pipes break or become silted up they are simply replaced with more durable plastic ones. The same ditches around field perimeters are cleared and re-excavated by mini-digger every year; the same Victorian outlets routinely cleared. Only fifty years ago Charlie’s grandmother Judy would, like most farmers, spend her winter weekends in a ditch with a spade, keeping the outlets clear and running. Some still prefer to do this by hand. One misjudgement by a digger driver and the holding pipe can be dislodged, changing the angle of the outflow and wrecking a system that has worked for centuries.
The Victorian obsession with getting excess water off the land as fast as possible has entered our DNA, and in times of excessive rainfall, with water flowing into all the outlets and all the rivers all at once, fuelling floods, our instincts tell us we simply need more of the same. We need, or think we need, to get the water off the land even faster. The sooner the water can disappear away from us out to sea, we feel, the safer our homes, farms, property, livestock and land, will be.
But there is another way of dealing with water. Charlie’s and my first tentative defection against the principle of drainage at any cost was made long before we had any thoughts of rewilding. Drainage on our floodplains had never worked well enough for arable crops. The soil remained soggy and prone to surface water no matter how many drains were cored into it. In the summer it was possible to graze livestock on the laggs but there was always a risk of liver fluke, a harmful parasite transmitted by water snails. Fencing was a problem, too. Water meadows running alongside a water course are inevitably long and thin and require a greater quantity of fencing than the conventional square field. By the 1990s, the peak of our arable and dairy production, we had 260 acres of laggs that were just not worth the cost of fencing. When the fence around an eight-acre water meadow near Brookhouse dairy fell into disrepair we decided, instead, to break up the drains and dig out some scrapes to create opportunities for waterfowl. From the moment there was standing water, we had teal, mallard, wigeon and moorhens. Once vegetation like reed mace and rushes had grown up around the edges, we were seeing reed warblers, and long-tailed tits in the scrub. A visiting ornithologist pointed out goldcrests – a bird normally associated with coniferous woodland. The goldcrests were our first clue, though we didn’t register it at the time, that species may not always keep to the habitats designated them in modern guidebooks.
The immense satisfaction of re-creating bodies of standing water on the land encouraged us to embark on a carp-farming enterprise – another attempt at diversifying on the farm. There were native crucian carp in Knepp lake, and faster-growing mirror carp from Europe had been introduced in the 1930s to sell on to angling ponds. Extending the carp business would, we hoped, be a solution for some of our problematic water meadows. We received planning permission to restore the dam wall of Hammer Pond at Shipley, fallen into disrepair following the demise of the iron industry, and set to work excavating the shadow of the old five-acre pond behind it with a digger.
Smashing up the Victorian drains felt, at first, unnervingly like vandalism. These were the arteries that, it was inculcated in us, allowed the blood of our fields to flow. But watching the lake, last described in 1849, resurface and lap around the edges of the laggs was hugely gratifying. It felt as though this is what the clay had been yearning to do. In all, we restored eighteen ponds and lakes. Not all of them were stocked with carp. Some we restored just for the sheer fun of it: from old watering-holes on ditch lines at the corner of fields and ancient ponds along the green lane that would once have refreshed livestock on their long plod to market, to the delightfully named Honeypools and the elegant expanse of Spring Wood Pond in the park. Ultimately, the carp enterprise has proved a successful addition to the diversification of the estate, but the reappearance of water on the land and all the wildlife it attracts is reward of another kind.
It was not until we had embarked on the rewilding project, though, that we began to think in a deeper way about the water crossing our land. A conversation with Hans Kampf, one of the early members of our Advisory Board, the summer after the floods of 2000, as we walked along the edge of the canalized Adur, set us thinking about the movement of water from the moment it fell as raindrops on our soil, through its progress into drains and ditches, streaming into the river and down towards the sea.
Hans is a man of many dimensions. He grew up on polder land three kilometres from Amsterdam airport, son of an air-traffic controller. Somewhere between picking fungi in the autumn woods next to the airport and forays to a local pond to collect water fleas for his schoolteacher’s fish tank, he was stirred, he says, by a pressing desire to ‘give more freedom to nature’. At the time he joined our board in its first year he was senior policy advisor to the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, and about to become Executive Director of the Large Herbivore Foundation, an advocacy for endangered megafauna in Eurasia. His experience working with natural processes at the Oostvaardersplassen and establishing large-scale ecological networks across borders in Europe gives him a rare ability to relate micro with macro. Above all he is, like Frans Vera, both thinker and doer, and a man of unqualified optimism. ‘What’s impossible today might be possible tomorrow, and if not, next week,’ he says brightly. He also has, like most Dutch ecologists, a profound understanding of the behaviour of water.
With 17.7 million people crammed into 16,000 square miles (one sixth the area of the UK), the Netherlands is the most densely populated country in Europe. Since half the country is at or below sea level, it is also one of the most vulnerable in the world to flooding. For a thousand years, since Dutch farmers built the first dykes, the Netherlands has been fighting back the water. The entire country is a complex system of man-made dykes, dams and floodgates, drainage ditches, canals and pumping stations. Dutch water engineers are the best in the world and their expertise is exported around the globe. In the 1620s the English imported a Dutch engineer, Cornelius Vermuyden, to drain the Fens of East Anglia for agriculture. But what the Dutch are currently advocating for river systems challenges centuries of accepted wisdom about water control – including their own.
Catastrophic floods in the Netherlands in 1993 and 1995, in which 200,000 people were evacuated and hundreds of farm animals died, exposed the inherent weakness of the existing river-dyke system. Increased rainfall resulting from climate change supercharged the country’s four main rivers and put pressure on flood defences as never before. The threat for the Dutch is no longer just from the sea. With the frequency of severe freshwater flooding predicted to increase, Dutch engineers have realized there is no way of building dykes big enough and stable enough to resist these cataclysmic floods. A different approach is needed. Instead of channelling water off the land as fast as possible, they are now reversing the process and trying to keep it on the land for longer. Like the Germans and the Chinese, the Dutch are giving back hard-won reclaimed land – polders – to the rivers, cutting meanders back into the floodplains and restoring the old marshes and wetlands. Houses built on floodplains are being demolished and their inhabitants resettled on higher ground. The boy is taking his finger out of the dyke. There is still much work to be done. But already the ‘Room for the River’ project has reduced the risk of extreme flooding in the Netherlands from once every 100 years to once every 1,250 years.
As we walked beside our diminutive canal, twenty-five feet across at its widest, its banks so steep the dogs need a helping hand getting out after a swim, the ghost of the Adur’s old meanders snaking down the floodplain alongside us seemed to sketch an alternative. Ahead of us the ruin of the old castle on its grassy knoll stirred up visions of the days when the river beneath it would rise and fall of its own volition, following its own rhythm. Fill in the canal, Hans suggested, and return the river to its floodplain. This, he said, would not only create enormous opportunities for wetland birds, flora and invertebrates, it would mitigate flooding downstream. The laggs would soak up excess water like a sponge, holding it back from general spate in times of heavy rainfall, releasing it slowly and safely, while also storing up water for drier seasons. The marshy vegetation would act as a filter, purifying the heavy nitrate run-off entering our land from intensive farms around us. And removing the weirs would encourage the migration of salmonids again, moving up from the sea.
The response from the Environment Agency was enthusiastic. They had maintained the canal into the twenty-first century at huge expense to the taxpayer without really knowing why they were doing it. No one at the EA could remember the reason for the five high-maintenance weirs on our stretch of the Adur, other than the weak justification that it provided coarse fishermen with deeper pools to fish in. Such is the excruciating process of civil-service decision-making, however, that it took nine years of bureaucracy and convoluted feasibility studies before the project got under way. Finally, in September 2011 we stood, watching Reg, the digger driver, making his first impressions in the floodplain.
The aim was to create a more natural, shallow riverbed with softer banks so the river would readily spill over in heavy rains, as it used to. But naturalizing anything is a challenge, particularly when it falls to an Environment Agency digger driver who has spent most of his working life applying himself to the exact opposite. ‘Natural’ was not in Reg’s mindset. No matter how often Charlie stood exasperated by his side, trying to reinforce the concept, Reg could not be persuaded to commit the Hymac excavator to creating a messy, shallow channel. Instead he constructed – over two long years and at huge expense to the taxpayer – what looked more like a separate, winding, steep-sided canal. After he had finished, no doubt looking back over his shoulder with intense satisfaction, we brought in another digger at our own expense to soften some of his edges, hoping that our grazing animals, once they had easier access to the water, would continue the process by trampling and puddling the margins. A team of volunteers from the Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust installed artificial ‘woody debris blockages’ of fallen trees to create a more dynamic flow of water and help deposit silt in the channel. The excavation of shallow scrapes elsewhere on the floodplain adds a further dimension to the evolving wetland but several dry patches of meadow indicate where old drains still managed to evade the digger.
Nevertheless, the results have been astonishing. The year after completion we saw green sandpipers on the muddy banks and a little egret stalking the scrapes. Mallard were soon nesting in the reeds and mandarin ducks flew down to feed from their nests in the trees at the head of the lake. Lapwings followed soon after – in 2016 Penny, our ecologist, managed to ring two fledglings – and the shallow scrapes, colonized by small fry and amphibians, are now patrolled by up to sixteen herons at a time. In 2012 the Environment Agency removed the largest of the weirs and decommissioned three of the others – including the self-regulating donkey weir in Shipley – allowing fish to cross them for the first time since their construction. By 2013 sea trout were migrating up the river in numbers. One volunteer saw six of them wriggling up over the Hammer dam wall spillway in just half an hour.
Data from a flow box installed at Bay Bridge where the Adur leaves Knepp has not yet been analysed by the Environment Agency. But anecdotally, at least, it seems the re-naturalization of our section of the river is having an impact on the flow of water around and below us. Estate cottages at Tenchford and Knepp Mill, notoriously prone to flooding in the past, haven’t flooded since the project began. Even after severe storms the A281 downstream at Henfield, often closed because of floods, has remained passable.
Our project, however, covers just a modest one-and-a-half-mile stretch of a small river. For another fifteen miles from us to the sea, the remainder of the Adur is a featureless, canalized conduit with sheer banks virtually devoid of wildlife. When Charlie and the children paddled in blow-up canoes under the A24 to Shoreham-by-Sea one spring they saw three mallard, a couple of swans and a skylark in all those fifteen miles. To appreciate the grand potential of river re-naturalization Charlie and I visited an upland rewilding project in the Lake District begun in 2003, around the same time as Knepp. ‘Wild Ennerdale’ is a partnership between Natural England and three landowners – the Forestry Commission, the National Trust and United Utilities (the north-west’s water and waste-water company). The partnership’s aim is ‘to allow the evolution of Ennerdale as a wild valley for the benefit of people, relying more on natural processes to shape its landscape and ecology’. Since the 1920s, conifer plantations, including non-native sitka spruce, had, in the words of author and fell-walker Alfred Wainwright, thrown ‘a dark funereal shroud of trees’ over the seventeen-square-mile valley. Forestry tracks carved up the land and, like much of upland Britain, sheep had grazed the remaining land to the bone.
Looking out over Ennerdale today, from slopes a couple of hundred feet above the old plantations, Wainwright would hardly recognize the place. The great headwall still shadows the top of the dale, of course, with the 3,000 foot fells of Great Gable, Haystacks, Pillar and Kirk Fell shedding snow and rainwater into the valley; and seven miles downstream at the end of the valley the repository of Ennerdale Water, a glacial lake two and a half miles long surrounded by farmland, looks eternally placid. In between, however, the dale is slipping the yoke of human control. The management policy is now as light as the partners dare. Forestry tracks have been abandoned, and boundary fences, bridges and a concrete ford have been removed, allowing Arctic char and other fish back up to their old spawning grounds. Larch plantations (now uncommercial), wrecked by storms in 2005 and battered by an outbreak of blight in 2013–14, have been left to decline, allowing large areas to regenerate with native species like hazel, aspen, ash, birch and Scots pine – favourite of the red squirrel. Sheep numbers have been dramatically reduced and the once intensively grazed valley floor and woodland is now much more lightly grazed by a small herd of old-breed Galloway cattle. Their trampling breaks through the sward to initiate further vegetation recovery.
On the hillsides the former billiard-table surface of sheep-cropped grass has erupted into riotous 3D. Browsed domes of holly, birch saplings and rowan trees punctuate a bulbous ground cover of sphagnum and star moss, heather, ferns, fungi and lichens – splashes of pillar-box red and mustard yellow against a busy spectrum of greens. Dark purple splatterings of thrush and grouse droppings on the rocks indicate that we are not the only ones gorging on wild bilberries. Here and there, clumps of juniper evoke the original Norse meaning of Ennerdale – Juniper Valley. Walking across this spongy hillside carpet you feel like there are springs in your boots.
The resurgence of natural vegetation on the sides of the valley is now holding back the soil and soaking up rainwater, dramatically reducing the amount of run-off into the river. But the river at Ennerdale is also putting on the brakes. When we descend to walk along it, the Liza looks more like a river in Alaska or the Himalaya. It flows in fingers over gravelly, boulder-strewn courses between impermanent islands of birch, spruce, heather and grasses. Gravel banks shift and build, waiting for the next flood to smash them to smithereens and reassemble them in another formation. Without bridges or revetments, unpiped, unchannelled, the river chomps freely all around it, clawing at the forest, creating new margins, reinventing itself with every big rainfall. Fallen trees and woody debris create blockages and diversions, absorbing and neutralizing the water’s energy, taming the monster.
The devastating floods hurtling off hillsides in the Lake District in 2009 threw up obvious comparisons with the singular response of rewilded Ennerdale. On 18 and 19 November, cataclysmic rain descended in the high fells (Thirlmere, five miles from Ennerdale, received the record – 405 millimetres over the course of thirty-eight hours). With the hillsides grazed to short grass swards and compacted by huge numbers of sheep over several centuries, there was nothing to intersect the passage of water into streams and rivers, most of which had been modified into narrow, high-energy drainage channels. Within hours the pulse of floodwater had burst from the channels, and was bringing down bridges and buildings and cascading down lanes and roads. Soil and gravel poured into the torrent from the unstable, eroded hillsides and scoured down the valleys, unleashing a cement-mixer tsunami on towns and villages downstream. By contrast, at Ennerdale, where the soft, absorbent land acted like a sponge, the flood flows quickly dissipated and the Liza was still clear and fordable the day after the downpour. When terrifying floods struck Cumbria again in 2015 during Storm Desmond, and towns like Appleby, Penrith, Carlisle, Keswick, Kendal, Cockermouth and Workington suffered all over again, none of the villages below Ennerdale, including Ennerdale Bridge and Egremont, flooded.
In Pickering in the Yorkshire Dales, a community-led project based on the same principles of naturalistic flood management has proved just as effective. Stuck at the bottom of a steep gorge draining much of the North Yorks Moors, Pickering was flooded four times between 1999 and 2007, with the last disaster causing £7 million in damage. The solution, the local authorities insisted, was to build a £20 million concrete wall – a Berlin Wall of sorts – right through the lovely old town centre to keep the water in the river. None of the inhabitants, understandably, were enamoured of the idea so, instead, they researched a plan to slow the flow of the water from the hills and persuaded the Environment Agency, Forestry Commission and DEFRA to support them. In the becks above the town, Forestry Commission staff built 167 leaky dams of logs and branches – letting normal flows through but slowing down the high ones – and added 187 lesser obstructions, made of bales of heather in smaller drains and gullies. Elsewhere, off the Forestry Commission estate, they planted 29 hectares (72 acres) of woodland upstream and, after much bureaucratic tangling, built a bund – or embankment – near the bottom of the catchment, to store up to 120,000 cubic metres (26 million gallons) of floodwater, releasing it slowly through a culvert.
Three months after it was inaugurated, on the fateful Boxing Day of 2015, it rained for twenty-four hours. The chairman of the Pickering and District Civic Society climbed up to the bund to check it and, finding it working well, returned home, switched on the TV and saw the devastation being caused by floodwaters all over northern England. Pickering, alone, was spared. The total cost of the Pickering scheme had been around £2 million. That was a tenth of the cost of the concrete wall proposed by the local authorities – a wall, most inhabitants are convinced, that would not have coped with the floods anyway.
Meanwhile, over in Wales, studies at Pontbren in the Brecon Beacons have proved that, by simply removing the sheep and planting trees, the rate at which water infiltrates the soil is sixty-seven times greater than on pastures tightly grazed by sheep, where their stiletto hooves compact the soil.
On average, flooding costs the UK economy £1.1 billion a year. The cost of the 2015 floods alone was £5 billion. One in six properties in the UK is now at risk of flooding. But this need not be. The evidence, both in the UK and abroad, is incontrovertible: naturalizing rivers and rewilding river-catchment areas prevents flooding. It is far cheaper, safer and more resilient than engineering hard flood defences. And it brings with it other huge economic benefits in terms of water purification, soil restoration, drought resistance and wildlife. Yet in the UK we are still being disastrously slow on the uptake. While forward-thinking countries like the Netherlands, Germany and China are giving over huge amounts of money and land to re-naturalize their rivers and wetlands, we continue to allocate the bulk of our grant money for flood defence to conventional, large-scale, hard engineering schemes.
River re-naturalization projects, meanwhile, have to rely on levering funds from local authority or Lottery Fund grants and corporate donations. The Sussex Flow Initiative – a partnership between the Woodland Trust, Sussex Wildlife Trust and the Environment Agency, begun in 2014 to promote natural flood management in the River Ouse catchment – receives funding from Lewes District Council and the Royal Bank of Canada, and nothing from the Environment Agency or any other government agency. As I write, in 2017, sixteen years after we first applied for funding for our project, there are still precious few incentives from government for landowners and farmers to store water in ponds or on floodplain fields. On the contrary. Strong disincentives to avoid re-naturalizations still persist, since water bodies of any description are categorized as ‘Permanent Ineligible Features’ and so exempt from farm subsidies. While grants do exist for planting trees on uplands and along rivers, there is little or no proactive engagement with farmers and landowners to encourage their uptake, and there are still no grants to promote natural regeneration. The re-naturalization of a meagre mile and a half of the River Adur at Knepp remains, shamefully, one of the largest stretches of river restoration on private land in the UK.