Reimagining the Somerset Levels

The Somerset Levels, the birthplace of England, ought to be our Camargue. But this fabled landscape has been desecrated beyond all recognition. Now, at long last, change is in the air.

The rain this winter has been unrelenting, and parts of the country have come to resemble a series of huge lakes. What the pundits and flooding experts rarely tell us though is that some of the larger of these seasonal lakes would once have looked like this every winter, if it weren’t for more than a century of heavy engineering and ongoing strenuous efforts to keep the water out. Britain has lost anywhere between 90 and 99% of its wetlands, even if you wouldn’t believe it looking out of the train window today. Among the greatest of these is the Somerset Levels, known as the Vale of Avalon, once a vast, shimmering, seasonal inland sea, framed by the Blackdown Hills to one side and the Mendips to the other and bisected by the Poldens.

According to folklore, the Somerset Levels was a hiding place for King Alfred of Wessex at Athelney following the fall of his kingdom to the Vikings during the Easter of 878 AD; thereby coming to be known as the birthplace of England. The earlier establishment of several monasteries and churches at Glastonbury (whose name is derived from the glassy appearance of the water that once surrounded it) is linked to the legend that Jesus Christ came here, having travelled to Britain with the merchant Joseph of Arimathea, later one of the disciples, a legend immortalised in William Blake’s epic Jerusalem. The two are said to have visited the ancient town which, like the other elevated settlements that dot the Levels, is built on top of what was once a natural island known as Glastonbury Tor.

And this fabled landscape was sacred earlier still, to the Celts, because of its confluent position on one of Britain’s most significant ley lines, which are said to link the sacred sites of England. Ley lines are often likened to the Chinese feng shui idea of beneficial alignment, or to the energy associations of Aboriginal songlines.

The Somerset Levels of the future

If Christ did indeed visit the Vale of Avalon, his experience would have been radically different from what you’ll find today. Heading west from Selwood, where I live, undulations give way to a flatness, the latticework of neon-green fields broadening into much larger ones bordered by fences instead of hedges. There are fewer trees, I imagine because of the deep peat beneath. A town named Street heralds your arrival in the Levels. The landscape is wide and seems somehow concave, and sinking. Black and white Friesian dairy cows crowd some of the fields. Interspersed are expanses of maize in summer, and dark, bare soil in winter. Sheep dot the higher ground in the distance. Several canals run dead straight across the landscape. There isn’t much to suggest today that this had once been a marvellous inland sea. Just a blink of an eye ago, wild ox and horses, boar, red and roe deer, lynx, wildcats, beavers, pine martens, cranes, marsh harriers, white-tailed eagles, vast aggregations of wading and sea birds and even Dalmatian pelicans abounded here; the water thronged with salmon, trout, all kinds of fish, extraordinary numbers of eels and even pond turtles.

The Somerset Levels are fed by the rivers Axe, Brue, Parrett, Tone and Yeo, all of which have been engineered beyond recognition, in works carried out mostly since the Second World War with the sole aim of transferring their flow into the sea as fast as possible and creating an artificial area of dry ground for farming. A human-made river, the Huntspill, was built during the 1940s with sluices at both ends to serve as a sixth major drainage channel. Those who worked on the project failed to dig the Huntspill as deep as had originally been intended, making gravity-fed drainage from the surrounding landscape impossible. As a result, the water must be pushed uphill at great expense by the continual action of pumps. A seventh major drain running between the River Parrett and King’s Sedgemoor Drain, named the River Sowy, was completed in the 1970s. For miles around, the landscape is artificially drained by a vast network of smaller rhynes that are pumped up into the larger drains. Meanwhile, much of the peat that underlies the Somerset Levels has been removed using giant machines to sell as fertiliser, leaving behind ugly pockmarks across the western reaches of the landscape.

It’s hard to conceive of a place more comprehensively dominated, manipulated and transformed away from what nature intended for so little gain. What was once western Britain’s great mist-shrouded, sacred wetland has been converted into 140,000 acres of dull, low-grade, unprofitable farmland, all of which is slowly collapsing into a mire of drying peat in a process that produces a greater volume of greenhouse gas emissions every year than everything else in Somerset combined. As the peat dries out and the ground sinks ever lower, the effort required to keep out the water becomes ever greater. The eye-watering cost is borne by taxpayers, though few know anything about it. To me, the whole thing is an ongoing, bewildering act of vandalism.

A gaggle of nature organisations including the Somerset Wildlife Trust, Somerset Wildlands, Natural England and others are doing their best – in the face of stiff opposition – to restore life to the Levels. Their efforts are focused on an area that has come to be known as the Avalon Marshes, recently declared Britain’s newest super nature reserve, where they have cobbled together and rewetted several thousand acres. The unmarked road leading to Shapwick, at the centre of the initiative, is long and straight, and runs above the level of the surrounding farmland. Once, the Neolithic people who lived on the higher, drier ground here used wooden sticks pinched from beavers to put together a huge grid of wooden walkways across the flooded, reedy ground. Some of these are still present today, preserved in the peat and exposed now once again.

The small but growing patchwork of connected reserves here at the centre of the Avalon Marshes offer a glimpse of what could be. The rhynes have been stopped up and water levels have been allowed to rise despite unrelenting obstruction from the internal drainage boards. Life is already flooding back into a mosaic of habitats; channels of water snaking through broad beds of reeds, areas of open water and small elevations of land carpeted with wildflowers beneath stands of willow and alder. The birdsong is rich and varied, different from anything I know from my own patch to the east. Rare wetland birds sing from within the green; last time I visited, two marsh harriers glided lazily overhead. The booming of bitterns can be heard here for the first time in generations, and even majestic cranes, eaten by nobility and royalty to near extinction centuries ago, are breeding here once again. Vast murmurations of starlings take shape during the winter. The Avalon Marshes is a place like no other I’ve ever experienced in Britain.  

There are some parts of Britain where current land management runs so contrary to the grain of nature, for so little productivity, that wholesale change is needed. The landscape of the Somerset Levels, representing both an ecological catastrophe and an economic folly, falls into this category. It really is time for the pumps to be shut down, the drains stopped up, the streams and rivers rewiggled, and the water allowed to return to where it belongs. A whole new way of living needs to emerge here, with an increased focus on nature tourism; traditional, extensive summer-only grazing by native cattle, water buffalo even, and perhaps some semi-wild horses; the harvesting of reeds for building material and soil conditioner; the pathway oiled with so-called natural capital payments to reward landowners for their help in reducing flooding, delivering cleaner water and taking measures that store carbon from the atmosphere. This too is a place where the government should be more prepared to buy land that comes up for sale. With ever greater deluges of water falling from the skies each winter, in the Somerset Levels change is inevitable. So we might as well come together and embrace it now.