With warnings of the El Niño weather system bringing heavy rain and storms this winter, the Environment Agency held a public information event explaining the work they will be undertaking to help keep Bideford safe from flooding. Major construction works are about to start as part of the Kenwith Valley Flood Scheme to update the dam operation and the drainage downstream of it. Pictures of people wading knee deep in a flooded Alexandra Terrace in 1993 make a strong case for the need to carry out these works. 

The name of the nearby Marsh Farm reminds us that, before adequate drainage was installed, many farms struggled with bogs, swamps, and heavy wet soils. 

However, at the recent ‘Rise up for Rivers’ event organised by the Taw and Torridge River Champions, we heard that Victorian land drainage is one of the factors which is leading today not only to increased flooding, but to pollution from run-off. 

In order to bring more land into productive use, the Victorians embarked on a massive programme of field drainage, clearing and straightening ditches, and laying earthenware drainage pipes deep beneath the soil. We were shown maps of today’s field boundaries compared with those of centuries past to see how field boundaries and water courses were straightened and rationalised. This creates clearer channels for rainwater to run off the fields and into streams and rivers, but when there is heavy rain there is a danger of flooding. Where previously rivers meandered slowly down to the sea, providing ideal spawning grounds for migratory fish, they too have been straightened. Fashionable estate lakes, while looking pretty, very often added to the destruction of natural wetlands.

Now with climate change we are counting the cost of all this rationalisation and beautification. We need water to be retained for longer in fields and in culm grasslands, so it doesn’t pour downstream taking silt and everything in its path with it. Nitrates and phosphates that farmers use as fertiliser are swept off the fields and into rivers, changing the chemical composition of the water and causing as much a threat to the ecology as the sewage pollution we hear so much about. 

Now the priority is to slow down the rate at which water finds its way off the fields and into our rivers. Riverside planting can slow down run-off, and ‘leaky dams’ can hold back water for longer and provide shelter for wildlife.