I remember my uncle, the farmer (see Aunty Bina’s Farm), explaining why he preferred certain fields for crops, and others for his “be-asts”. Potatoes, sugar beet, and wheat grew best on warp land, whereas the cattle grazed on pasture.
I may be mistaken, but looking now on Streetview, I fancy that the line of the low bank around the field followed the line of the lane. The fields were for crops, while the cows grazed behind the house.
But thinking about it now, it puzzled me. The buildings in the far distance are on the other side of a railway line, and there is a canal beyond that, with the river at the other side of the canal. How could the river water have been diverted into the fields?
Perhaps the water came from a different river. The River Aire is around two miles to the North behind the camera, and the River Ouse about three miles to the East, but I think these would have been too far, and several main roads, the villages of Rawcliffe and Airmyn, and the town of Goole were in the way. My guess is that the warp water must have come from the river beyond the railway, canal, and buildings - the Dutch River (or River Don).
Wikipedia provides an answer: “The first reliable report of warping seems to come in the 1730s from Rawcliffe, which is near the confluences of the Ouse with the Aire and the Don, where a small farmer called Barker used the technique.” Neither the railway nor the canal would have been there then. The Knottingley and Goole Canal was opened in 1826, and the Wakefield, Pontefract and Goole section of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway in 1846. The warping must have been done before these dates. Some of the brick outhouses at the farm could easily have dated from that time, and knowledge of the warping would have been passed down by word of mouth.
The railway, canal, and Dutch River can be seen running parallel in the lower left quarter of this 1962 map (pre-motorway). The oddly straight Dutch River is clearly another man-made feature. It was constructed in the 1630s by Dutch engineers, who diverted the River Don to drain the moors of Hatfield Chase, hence the name “The Dutch River”. The River Don originally flowed further East into the River Trent. Warping of my uncle’s land must have used water from the diverted river Don.
More extensive warping schemes were carried out in the Nineteenth Century along the original course of the Don, as far East as Adlingfleet on the Trent, and as far South as Crowle. One large area is served by the enormous Swinefleet Warping Drain (centre bottom of map) which runs for 5.6 miles (9 km) and has a permanent sluice into the River Ouse. The drain and much of the network of drainage ditches are deep and wide. Some are stocked with fish for anglers, and all provide habitats for frogs, sticklebacks, water voles, and other wildlife. It is astonishing to think it was all dug out by hand. But, we do not only alter our landscape. Families with Dutch names still live in the area, and the local name for drainage ditches is dykes.
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| Swinefleet Warping Drain |
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| Swinefleet Sluice where the warping drain enters the Ouse |
Two areas of unreclaimed land remain just to the South: Thorne and Hatfield Moors, which together form the largest expanse of lowland peat bog in the country. Even the intrepid Yorkshire Pudding’s Geograph project has not much ventured there.
One last piece of trivia. In the film “The Dam Busters” (1955), the aeroplanes are shown flying along a Dutch canal. It was actually filmed flying East along the Dutch River. The Goole shipyard cranes can be seen as the planes approach the River Ouse and then bank left over the town. Please don’t tell the East Riding Council. It will give them ideas about what to do with the place.
Dave Northsider is now trying to work out how he can divert river water into his polytunnel.
It interests me that so many in the UK and Europe want to save the environment, yet the environment has been so altered over hundreds of years. Forrest clearing has very much altered Australia's environment, and sadly taking over valuable natural and viable farmland land for housing goes on, but I don't think that our environment has been quite so altered as that of the UK. I won't mention our loss of animal species.
ReplyDeleteIn ancient times, I believe nearly all of Britain was heavily wooded. Some was lost more recently - I remember being taken on a ride inland from Dublin in Ireland, and was told that the bare hills had been old oak woodland, chopped down to build Nelson's fleet. It continues. I'm told that extensive areas in Lincolnshire are soon to be covered by huge solar farms.
DeleteI find this so interesting Tasker. I have never heard of warping. I was born in Lincoln in 1932 and lived for the first twenty years of my life in Washingborough - three miles away.We lived just one field away from the River Witham. They dredged it yearly and piled the siilt up on one bank. the other bank was adjacent to the railway line to Skegness and beyond that the Sincil drain - which always had water in it. One year the Witham flood ed and the water came up to the bottom of our garden. But I have never heard of warping. Perhaps we were not far enough in the fens. My mother came from Bardney which was further in - there was a large sugar beet factory there. Folk used to 'take' a field as a family and get paid for 'beet singling' a back-breaker only slightly less back breaking than potato picking.
ReplyDeleteI think warping was mainly confined to this region of Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire. The fens were naturally fertile from debris washed down from the Midlands.
DeleteI doubt many people now would put up for long with harvesting potatoes and sugar beet the old way.
From the moment our species understood that they could sow and reap plants (and not just collect them where they found them), they have sought to alter the environment in a way that their fields and pastures profited from it. What has changed is the tools and technologies used, of course, and a better understanding of the bigger picture - you change something at one end, and it can (and does) significantly influence the other end.
ReplyDeleteIn spite of all our knowledge, we still hack away at tropical (and other) forests, and in our settlements do our best to seal each and every available square inch of ground. Sigh!
PS: I didn't mean to sound quite so glum. In fact, I find your post very interesting. My area is hillier and has different rivers, not affected by tides, but I do know that similar "warping" (maybe by a different name) has been taken place in those parts of Germany close to the North Sea - probably not so much on the Baltic coast, since tides are not as significant there.
DeleteI feel pretty glum about the environment, too.
DeleteI don't know about warping in outside England, but it has to be done with fresh water rather than salt water. In my area, the silt carried by the rivers would have washed down from the Yorkshire Pennines.
We've been changing the landscape for centuries. What we think is nature is often the work of previous generations! The old rhyme about February: February filldyke, with either black or white, echoes your comment about Dutch words.
ReplyDeleteI'd forgotten February filldyke.
DeleteWasn't there a tv programme years ago about the making of the English landscape, and how, as you say, nothing is unaffected by human activities?
Maps tell you so much if you are prepared to read them. Warping must be like water meadows I suppose when fields were small.
ReplyDeleteI could look at maps for hours. I liked map reading questions in Geography at school.
DeleteI guess water meadows do the same thing, but more naturally.
That is fascinating.
ReplyDeleteIn Ancient Egypt, the annual Great Inundation heaped fertile soil on the river banks. That ceased with the building of the Aswan Dam.
I remember reading that about the banks of the Nile somewhere. The Aswan must have ruined traditional ways of life in many ways.
DeleteThat's interesting. I'm impressed you were able to consider and work out the possible sources of the water. I've seen the word "dyke" used here in London too, as in "Grim's Dyke," a prehistoric earthwork in North London. (Maybe not the same as a drainage ditch, as I think Grim's Dyke was a fortification.)
ReplyDeleteIn Holland, I believe dykes are earthworks, such as in the story of the boy who saved everyone by putting his finger in the leaking dyke which held back the sea. Perhaps we originally called them dykes because the dug out earth was piled at the sides to make banks, but by the time I came along it was synonymous with ditch.
DeleteFascinating explanation of a landscape you know well. How ingenious it all was - requiring a great deal of hard work.
ReplyDeleteThey must have had hundreds of people toiling with shovels. It probably continued until the mid-C20 because all the ditches needed maintenance. I've noticed people listed as water drainage labourers in the censuses.
DeleteI'd never heard of the term 'warp lands' before. It set me off down a google rabbit hole.
ReplyDeleteI went down there writing this blog post. I think it would be possible to work out from genealogy resources on which farms the farmers that are mentioned lived, but I haven't done so. I do know the Creykes lived at Rawcliffe Hall which is marked as a hospital in the map.
DeleteThe warping method must have filled the fields with essential growing minerals and trace elements resulting in very verdant pasture and productive vegetables and crops.
ReplyDeleteIt was apparently an expensive process, with lots of labour, but it must have been worth it. The commercial ventures around the Swinefleet drain were massive. It seems to have been discontinued before WW1.
DeleteWe have read this post with interest as Himself was living in Airmyn during the Second World War and remembers the crew of a crashed plane having cups of tea in his mother's kitchen while they waited to be collected.
ReplyDeleteQuite a lot of people moved to the area for safety during the war. A man called David Galloway has written several history books about Airmyn, and the incident may be mentioned in one of those. He and his father were well-known as the local milkmen.
DeleteWarping still takes place around Ely. You can see the Ely Drainage Board notes if you Google. I have sometimes see warping across the Ely Fens.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia may be misleading. I read it as saying that it ended before WW1. Presumably it meant it ended around the lower Ouse and north Lincs areas of the Trent then.
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