The winter weather of 2013/14; high rainfall in the South and West of England did not just cause severe flooding across the Somerset Levels, the rain also caused flooding within the surrounding hills: this has only recently, 4 and 5 months after the surface waters on the Levels have abated and started the long haul to dry out, has become apparent.
The Somerset Levels are an area of low-lying lands bordered on the north by the Bristol Channel. Surrounding the Levels on its other sides are a series of raised landscapes collectively known as the Mendip and Quantock Hills. Areas of great interest both as a landscape that is recognised as amongst the least spoilt by human impacts in the country and as an area of industrial activity; primarily historic mining and mineral winning.
When the floods abated the soils on many parts of the flat lands had leached much of its nutrients; organic and minerals, out of the soils structure. The complex cocktail that benefit crops; cereals and pasture, their artificial replacements have had to be applied. In the past natural mechanisms carried out the farmers’ role by natural fertilisation of the land. The natural refertilisation through application of trace minerals at the end of flood events is that natural occurrence that has been observed through time and across the globe known equally well by archaeologists, agronomists and botanists.
Historically annual flooding fertilised the Tigris/Euphrates Basin similarly the Nile Valley, both show the importance of the fertility brought down in the silts suspended in the flow that left rich sediments from the higher ground onto the floodplains. This fertility of the land allowed populations to grow in relation to the areas’ ability to feed populations and allowing the Cradle of Civilisation and the ancient Egyptian Empires to flourish. This fertilisation of floodplains and river basins is now known to take place on a global as well as continental scale: the great Amazon Basin with water flows and hydrological conditions of a land area being in perpetual semi flood would not be able to fertilise the forest through which it flows taking minerals purely from its Andes mountain source. The huge forests are dependent on the annual deposition of quantities of desert dusts that are blown from the Sahara; blown from Africa, across the Pacific Ocean to be dropped in rain on the lee of the western marginal mountain range of South America.
Historically the floodplains of English rivers have always been fertile and where the levels of the land did rise above the swamp and wetlands seasonally drying enough to allow sheep or cattle to move across the surface these areas became wet pasture. As populations grew and the need for food expanded the value of crops increased as did land values and so the land started to be looked at as needing to be developed to grow grains such as wheat and barley alongside providing the fodder for the livestock. These changes initially looked to increase the pasturelands by draining the marsh edges either by building embankments to push back the water dominated marsh or raising causeways to islands of raised land that were isolated within the mire.
The Somerset Levels and other low-lying regions such as the Fens, the Isle of Axholme and the surrounding lands in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire were considered by outsiders as wet and inhospitable areas, the people who inhabited them made livings from the local resources, fishing and wildfowling, trapping and basket making. A few became rich from these activities and moved away to higher ground but most made at best a meagre living. The lands either belonged to monasteries, nobles or to the monarch, up until the dissolution of the religious houses. The population even after the dissolution of the monasteries were still considered lowly beings and little more than antisocial, independently natured marsh dwellers.
These indigent were not so much antisocial as troublesome. One case in point demonstrating this graphically: the wildfowlers and fisher folk of the Isle of Axholme and Hatfield Moor at the mouth of the River Trent where it meets the flows of the Don and other Yorkshire rives to form the Humber Estuary. These citizens of the marshlands were living on the lands or wetlands belonging to the monarch Charles I who as every landlord of the period or any other for that matter wished to see landholdings increase. The King employed the best known drainage practitioner, a Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden, to turn royal lands from valueless bog to productive agricultural land as had been achieved in the Lincolnshire Fens with the Bedford Level thus making the land tenantable and income generating. The work was carried out over many years and still continues up to the present.
The marsh dwellers objected and rebelled and fought back against what they perceived as a threat to their existence and a Dutch invasion. The Marshland Civil War began before the English Civil War and did not finish till the reign of Charles II and the monarchy had been re-established for some years.
As in those past times those who live around the Somerset Levels today objected to the floods and the apparent lacklustre responses from government and the Environment Agency to the situation. No media or public attention was focused on the farmers own Internal Drainage Boards which are four in number; Axe, Brue and Parrett, also the North Somerset Levels IDB and funded by land owners, local authorities and central government. These IDBs are almost invisible organisations that are tasked to carry out the draining of the Levels and use local knowledge and hands on day to day drainage. They are the organisations that take their lead from the local drainage rate payers and their committees of interested parties. These groups do not like the tax though administer the rates expenditure.
Their knowledge of the situation of the main river, the lack of dredging had saved large rate increases and after the eventual flood saw central government cover the excess cost plus the damage rectification fund to remediate land and soil condition affected by protracted inundation. This was to cover replanting of annual lays of rye grass, fertilizing (unusual in that silt is a source of nutrient) cereal and fodder crops alongside replanting where needed, if feasible. Their inactivity leading up to and their invisibility during the event went someway to protecting the major land owners from having to admit their own mistakes.
Another aspect of the flooding, was the public disharmony with the state regarding not just the farmland being underwater, more anger was reserved for the inconvenience to local residents in the way they carry out their lives. This dissatisfaction with the regulator in great part demonstrated that apart from farmers no longer removing their beasts from the flood plains in winter it showed that the majority of the rural community found themselves to be disadvantage by getting cut off from ‘civilisation’ or their places of employment, children could not be driven to schools. This demonstration of rural community suggesting that the rural population generally did not rely on the land or service it but most commuted away from it daily to earn a living in the towns and cities of the area. In reality the agricultural lobby said little, the commuter population were those that tried to raise Caine and Able.
View out from the Mendips to the Bristol Channel with the Somerset Levels between.
As stated at the start of this paper the other flooding was in the hills about the Levels, the area was once an active region of metal mining from pre Roman times to the 20th Century. There are several locations that have been honeycombed with workings, tunnels and caverns; there are also many spoil heaps, the resting places of all the mine wastes. Alongside the raw wastes are those that came about from the smelting of metals, lead principally, but several others were also won at different periods including zinc.
The mining, refining and smelting metals leave behind many by-product metals, one such being cadmium, a common toxic metal around zinc mining sites. At Shipham and the nearby Rowberrow the legacy of zinc mining and smelting from the 16th century through to the 19th century has been left as to have the worst cadmium contaminated soils in the UK.
The Gruffy Ground (local name for mine slimes and waste materials) that are widespread in the area.
This contamination is bound up with other minerals and is in the normal run of weather patterns unable to become available as a free toxin and is non-hazardous; in hot summers such as in 1976, or in exceptional rainfall events this binding can breakdown. The drainage not just from this one area but from all the mineral rich hill ground around the levels are or have been leaching metals including copper, aluminium, arsenic and others.
In the past; at least 250 years ago there were large woods and forest remnant on the sides of the hills, from medieval times laws were in place to protect the Forests that belonged to the Crown. The hills around the Levels were royal hunting grounds and the woodland was an important home for the kingly quarry. From Iron Age times these forests were being cut down for ritualistic developments, fuel and to make shelters. Once metal mining became established deforestation was rapid; the need for charcoal to smelt the metals from the parent ores ensured the denudation and total transformation of the landscape.
The Forestry Commission did establish new woodland on the hills above the Levels after the First World War to ensure pit prop supplies for the Somerset and Bristol Coalfields into the future. Needless to say that particular requirement no longer exists, but the increase in afforestation is on the grounds of aiding greater capability for the land to retain precipitation over longer periods. The present landscape is semi moorland with s preponderance of sheep grazing a close cropped non moisture retentive limestone grassland.
Priddie Circles.
Chancellors Farm Lead Mines (aerial photograph).
Chancellors Farm (enhanced to show mine workings).
In Conclusion.
The people of the Somerset Levels were much aggrieved with the powers based in Westminster for not recognising the problems that were befalling a largely bypassed community: many feel you need to be lost to enter the area without specific reason; Glastonbury Tor being the one exception where tourists do go. The populace were also depressed by the Environment Agency not being seen to be more active, particularly as the Agency’s headquarters is close by outside Bristol. There was a feeling that they were being ignored and felt slighted.
It is questionable as to the role the internal drainage boards of the region played; they were non-existent to the media and the general public of the levels knew of them not. Their strategies for flood control had been completed and published with their committees’ approvals and each did not foresee such events as likely. The committees and their surveyors were remarkably fortunate that the transparency of modern government appeared to make them invisible.
The public demand for dredging brought about a small scale operation of scoop and dump weed clearing, all rather on the level of a charitable ‘best have a shot at it’ at huge cost; plant hire company directors and dredging consultants are likely to sun themselves for longer than usual after this jamboree of government hand ringing.
The farmers did suffer, or more so their stock that had no dry land to retreat to. In the past the Levels were known for spring and summer grazing; an area for finishing stock for Smithfield Show and the high end meat market. The stock had nearly always gone before the first inundation of winter. Today the grants available to increase stock holding, the increased profit margins for all year stock breading, raising and finishing is too tempting not to take a gamble.
Those farmers who have forsworn livestock for arable activity did much better though their grumbles were heard again in London and DEFRA found some spare loot to offer to muzzle those who had the media’s attention. The grants have though proved unusually hard to winkle out of the powers that be. The talk of land deoxygenated by floodwater standing too long were inundated by ‘dead’ moles within 24 hours of the flood subsiding, chasing the very alive ‘drowned’ earthworms that ecological pundits stated would not return for a generation.
The fact is that the soils have been subject to silt deposition with muds and some remarkable metalliferous top dressings, toxic by the kilo but not the micrograms which the grateful soil bacteria received. The Severn Estuary and the Bristol Channel played their part with the tides reversing the flow of floodwater twice daily; but if the sluices were maintained by the IDBs the large pumps brought over from the Netherlands would have not had to have been hired, installed, run, found to be unsuitable and returned. If the industrialisation of this part of England had not started in the Iron Age and the Romans developed mining in the hills, if Victorians had only not continued to win minerals and turn the local forests into charcoal the uplands would not have been the visitor attraction they are today, instead primeval forest with boar and servitude for the population.
There are a few winners in this story of the flood and the main beneficiary being the insurance industry as few; less than 100 householders were flooded out of their properties. Other winners were the people who found they could work from home.
In the end one may find no one to blame; there are many who could have done better, but as a community the populace kept up the traditions of the marshmen and women of yore by being troublesome and vociferous. This is surely a sign that British traditions are alive and well off the beaten track.
