This part of Vermuyden’s scheme worked — and continues to work, although Vermuyden’s original sluice collapsed after 50 years and had to be rebuilt. Vermuyden, however, assumed that the local fields could be easily drained into this and similar channels by gravity. In this he was mistaken, even though the black, waterlogged “soil” of his era was high enough. That wasn’t soil, though, it was peat. It had built up, as it always does, and would rot away as soon as it was drained and exposed to air. Within a few decades, the fields had sunk below Vermuyden’s drains. By the early 18th century, the Fens were once again flooded.

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Landowners were in a bind. They had spent vast sums on drainage and had enjoyed a tantalizingly brief period of high agricultural returns. To fix things, they paid increasingly high property taxes to support the drains, and they purchased “wind engines” to pump their excess water uphill into them. This didn’t do the trick; windmills were a lousy pumping technology. A single windmill pump cost a mammoth £800 to £1,500 to build ($75,000 to $150,000 in 2006 dollars) and required a full-time staff of two to operate. One windmill could only raise water about 6 feet, so several of them might be needed in series to get the water up to the drain. While a big windmill could produce a respectable 40 hp, it worked only in winds between 18 and 24 mph. During a really bad flood, the water in the drain could rise above the top of the windmill’s scoop wheel, rendering it useless. In the 18th century’s wet, cold winters, a frozen millrace would stop a mill’s scoop wheel from turning.

They coped. Fen owners settled into a system where only a third of the land would be drained and cultivated, while two-thirds was seasonally flooded for grazing. Land was brought into cultivation by “paring and burning” — that is, plowing lightly, then burning the aerated peat to sweeten the acidic peat underneath. The burnt-away peat greatly lowered the ground level, so that the field could only be kept under the plow for four to six years before it became too low for the windmills. Then the field would be allowed to flood again — and the peat would build up to its old level. It wasn’t a great system, but it worked. By 1800, 90 percent of the Fens was under this sort of rotation.

By the 1840s, steam engines had become small and cheap enough to replace the windmills — and this allowed, for the first time, Vermuyden’s dream of permanent drainage. Within 30 years, windmills and marshes virtually disappeared from the Fens; only one of each exists today. The tiny remaining windmill drained remote Adventurer’s Fen until the early 20th century, when England’s national preservation charity, the National Trust, bought it and all the surrounding land. That surrounding land, Wicken Fen, is now the only surviving Fen marsh and the single place where you can see how the Fens appeared before steam, with its windmill still in operation.

With modern engines, the Fen owners had all they needed to systematically drain the Fens, except for a system. Literally hundreds of commissions, authorities, councils and boards held the Fens in a chaos of jurisdictions that taxed, regulated, built, fined, overlapped, competed, provided sinecures, stoked egos, protected turf and built empires. Planning didn’t even make the top 10. All too often, an authority would “solve” a problem by dumping its unwanted water into the territory of someone else — who would, of course, make no allowance for it.

So the Fens were drained permanently, except when they were covered by disastrous floods. Typically, floods would come suddenly as a sluice or a bank failed during a major event, releasing a great surge of water onto downstream structures too weak to take it. The entire nonsystem could pancake in a few hours. When a failure of this sort occurred, church bells would ring to alert the folk of danger; the church itself, invariably on high ground, would serve as the evacuation shelter. After World War I, they tried to use air raid sirens, only to find the electricity failed before the sluices, and bells continued to ring out warnings as late as 1947.

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