Sandford Principle By The Back Door?

[marshman]

oops - meant Haddiscoe!!! Slipped a bit north!!!

[Vaughan]

Thank you for that post, Marshman, and I very much agree with you, but would like to add a bit more.

I have no "profession" in this respect, but this is my view on it, as taught to me by colleagues and friends of my father who really "knew" the marshes, such as Barry Johnson, Desmond Truman, Ted Landamore, Jack and Walter Cates, Ted Ellis, to name just a few.

 This used to be a waterlogged inland area, open to the sea and brackish water, which suffered a drop in sea level, a long time ago, and the reeds, fen and carr thus rotted down and became peat. Dare I call this "climate change"?

This peat was commercially dug until a long time later when the sea level rose again and flooded the peat pits, which we now call the Broads. Dare I also call this climate change?

The resulting salt marsh was then reclaimed by Dutch engineers who created the water meadows, drained by a system of dykes and pumped by wind power. Wind gave way to steam, steam became diesel and diesel is now electric, but the meadows are still pumped in the same way they always were and the land still has to be managed. It is not natural.

Poppy is quite right to talk of surge tides from the North Sea but the Dutch already knew about this from their own problems in the Friseans, and on the Zuyder Zee. They deliberately created "washlands" which were meadows, mainly on the Waveney but also on the lower Bure and Yare, which could be left to flooding and thus absorb two surge tides - there are always two together, when they come from the North Sea. Farmers moved their cattle off the meadow for a few days and all soon returned to normal. This is not just my opinion, this is hundreds of years of history.

That was the status quo until the late 60s. But then came the farmers!

The surge tides also brought salt water, from which a water meadow can quickly recover, but land used for arable crops will be effectively barren for several years after such an event. Profit had moved away from dairy farming and farmers needed to grow wheat, etc., so they pushed to get their land drained lower, and also protected from flooding, hence the high river banks which then appeared, for miles on the Waveney and the Bure.

The old washlands thus became fields of oilseed rape and the surge tides had to go somewhere else, such as Norwich, Reedham, Beccles, and even Wroxham. So even more flood banks had to built, which brings us to what we see around us today.

To answer your question Poppy, the flood barrier in Yarmouth Haven was only seen as a possible solution, after they had already messed up the whole hydraulic balance of the place, by closing off the washlands, which had worked for hundreds of years.

What is the future? I am not qualified to say, but I certainly know what we should have learned from the past!

 

[Poppy]

I agree with that view Vaughan - however 'now' is 'now' . Much of the washlands or water meadows bordering the lower reaches are no longer used for arable, but are of great interest to conservation groups. Get that nasty salt water on them and the habitat changes. Same 'problem', different interest groups.....

As for flooding of property and businesses , BFAP barely give them a mention here http://www.bfap.org/news_2006.html

"Brundall Riversdie, St. Olaves, Loddon boatyards and Reedham were also subject to flooding during this exceptional event."

I understood that 'exceptional events' were exactly the purpose of defences.

Increasing the capacity of the rivers to hold back flooding of washland coupled with a failure to adequately defend people's homes and livelihood is unacceptable !

[Vaughan]

By the way Timbo, did you notice I managed not to mention the Estuary, in all of my last post?

Poppy, I agree with you too but even 2006 is still a recent event in terms of Broads history.

9 minutes ago, Poppy said:

"Brundall Riversdie, St. Olaves, Loddon boatyards and Reedham were also subject to flooding during this exceptional event."

The old Broads boatyards were built near a railway station. That was the priority! If the marsh that were all built on flooded in the winter, then you just put your waders on and stood there in the sheds, in the water, and carried on painting the hulls. The use of power tools was not recommended though!

Hearts' old wooden boats all had "tingle" patches in the bottom which could be unscrewed and removed when in the sheds, so when a spring tide came up they could take water into the bilges, to stay on their chocks and not go wandering off across the sheds. The fear was how they might land when the tide went down again.

When Carol Gingell publishes the second of my mother's films about Hearts in the 50s, you will see the sort of winter conditions we lived with then, which were regarded as normal.

I don't honestly recall any great damage being done except by the 1953 floods but they, of course, were caused by a failure of the sea defences on the North Norfolk coast. A lot of people reckoned, in those days, that if the sea defences had held, the Broads themselves would not have flooded any more than usual.

[Timbo]

7 hours ago, Vaughan said:

By the way Timbo, did you notice I managed not to mention the Estuary, in all of my last post?

 

I did, I did indeed! Straight A student!

To go off at a tangent...what me? On this forum? Never! I have to say I had the pleasure of staying with Ted Ellis on a couple of occasions in my  mid teens at his country 'pile'. At the time he and Phyllis had just had central heating fitted the pipes running through the doorways as he didn't want holes putting in the walls. His habit of working in one room as a study...until it filled with so much paper that he moved onto the next room and started filling that with paper appealed to my teenage self as common sense. Listening to a conversation he was having where he defended boats and people in the Broadland landscape seemed to fly in the face of the modern conservationist views..."The people and boats are as much part of the landscape as the wildlife and both must learn to coincide!" he said before nipping off to his current study to fetch something...but never returning as he'd got distracted. What sticks most in my mind is the lift he gave my friend and I in the Renault 5 he had with the dash mounted gear shift. I'm sure Ted thought this had to be randomly fiddled with to put petrol in the engine as he would motor along at high speed and suddenly slam the car into first or second gear the engine screaming its pain before Ted would then stick it in fourth as the car juddered from five mile an hour back up to sixty when he'd stick it back in first. When the lift was over...including a butt clenching moment when he kangarooed onto Reedham Ferry my friend and I both kissed the ground.

[BroadScot]

22 minutes ago, Timbo said:

What sticks most in my mind is the lift he gave my friend and I in the Renault 5

Aye Tim, they don't make a car like that anymore ! probably just as well !

[JennyMorgan]

Ted was a wonderful character, a man who I knew as a fellow customer of Harry Last at Coldham Hall. Popped in for a pint and a mardle and Ted was in his regular spot  when in came the resident swan for its lunchtime saucer of ullage, it was that sort of pub. Our friendly swan had consumed a fair dollop of Bullards best, as had Ted, Harry & myself when we moved onto something a little stronger. The swan was to join us with several gins and it wasn't long before the swan was plastered! Something quite amusing about a drunken swan, its flippered feet slapped the tiled floor as it waddled around the bar, its long neck parallel to the floor, its head swaying from side to side rather like a metal detector. Ted was trying hard not to laugh, eventually pulling himself together and announcing that adding gin to a swan's tipple 'was not good practice'. By this time the swan's wings were outspread and it lurched towards the door, Ted relenting, joining in the mirth of those who had indulged the unfortunate bird. Harry later assured me that the bird was fine, having slept it off! 

[Vaughan]

Ted Ellis was a great Broadsman. I only have vague memories of him as a boy but my father liked him a great deal, both professionally, as a neighbour on the Yare and as regulars in Coldham Hall and Surlingham Ferry! He was indeed a naturalist who could also see the "broader picture". He knew that the Broads had to be commercial, in order to have income for its maintenance. Something we need to reflect on today.

I also remember the swan at Coldham Hall!

This subject has reminded me of Brian Thwaites, when he used to own Barnes yard in Wroxham (sorry - Hoveton). He was a good of friend of mine, and had been in RAF air/sea rescue before he came to the Broads, so he didn't suffer fools gladly.

On a high tide one winter, he was paddling around in the boat sheds when a car came slowly through all the floodwater on Marsh Rd and drew up a little way from his office, which, like all others around, was built up on stilts. The driver was a man in a suit who couldn't have got out of the car without going ankle deep in water, so Brian picked him up and carried him into his office.

It turned out that this man had come from some council or another to complain that Brian hadn't paid his drainage rates. As he told it, Brian told this chap exactly what to do with his drainage rates and then left him to find his own way back to his car!

 

[JennyMorgan]

Men in suits are best avoided at the best of times, I'm surprised that Brian gave him a lift in the first place!

[ranworthbreeze]

2 hours ago, JennyMorgan said:

Men in suits are best avoided at the best of times, I'm surprised that Brian gave him a lift in the first place!

Hi Peter,

I thought it was men in hats are best to be avoided

Regards

Alan