The Wash: battling to save Britain’s largest estuary

Driving north from Ely across the East coast of England, medieval churches follow one another in procession across the fenlands which border The Wash, Britain’s largest estuary. Little islands of comparative elevation in a landscape as horizontal as any in England. It’s not true what Noel Coward said: Norfolk isn’t “very flat”, but the Fens certainly are. They are also richly agricultural, black-soiled, saved over the centuries from the reach of the North Sea by dykes and reclamation; but still vulnerable, increasingly so. 

There is a strange, haunting, beauty to this low-lying landscape which stretches northwards across Lincolnshire and penetrates south and east from Norfolk into Cambridgeshire. The Wash estuary which dominates the area took its name from the Old Anglo-Saxon “wāse” meaning mud, wet ground or mire. The meeting place of sandy soils and salty marshes provided cover for invading Vikings for 200 years and helped its isolated communities fend off the Normans after 1066, for a while at least.

A sense of mystery is readily conjured under the deep grey skies and stubborn mists of a fenland winter. Dorothy L Sayers was born on the edge of this world and her most accomplished crime novel, The Nine Tailors, is set there. Her aristocratic amateur detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, crashes his car into a ditch after cresting a narrow road across a dyke in a winter snowstorm: “right and left, before and behind, the fen lay shrouded … the snow that had fallen all day gave back a glimmering greyness to a sky like lead.” 

Even today, black and white photographs best capture the watery atmosphere generated by canals and rivers and dyked fields with huge skies and elusive horizons far beyond. But there is colour deeply etched, for those who care to look. And no one looks more intently or draws out the landscape so vividly as the contemporary East Anglian painter, Fred Ingrams, whose iridescent paintings contrast light captured and light shadowed without any human presence in sight. 

The unending battle between the land and the sea has shaped the fenlands and the coastlines they abut. Ancient history reaching back five millennia to the Bronze Age has been resurrected by the careful digging of modern archaeologists. Burial mounds of a lineage not to be found elsewhere in England have been exposed, as have the narrow elevated tracks which shaped pre-modern grazing and droving patterns. And today, as for all the preceding yesterdays, this region has more in common with the “Low Countries” across the North Sea than with anywhere else in England. It was Dutchmen in the 17th century who helped engineer the drained landscape around The Wash as they had done for Holland earlier. Even now the Dutch still set exemplary standards of reclamation and coastal protection and may yet point the way as climate change threatens these low lying but richly agricultural areas in the decades ahead.

The challenges for the fenlands and The Wash take many forms, some more short term than others. Most immediately labour shortages generated by the implementation of Brexit and exacerbated by the impact of the Covid pandemic, need to be addressed in a sustainable way. Getting this right matters not only for the farmers and market gardeners in the Fens but for the rest of the country, too. It has been estimated that, in value terms, over half of the UK’s food is grown in the counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire drawing on local soils rich in nutrients. 

The 2021-22 report of the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on “Labour Shortages in the Food and Farming Sector” pointed to problems across the country, but the Fens have been particularly badly affected. The dependence on EU migrant workers was especially acute in an area which voted heavily for Brexit (Boston in Lincolnshire had the highest pro-Brexit vote in England). 

Using Wisbech and the area around it by way of example, the largest groups of EU migrants came from Lithuania (37 per cent), Romania (23 per cent) and Bulgaria (20 per cent). And the impact of the withdrawal of significant numbers of such migrants was highly disruptive to local agriculture: One of the largest agricultural enterprises based near King’s Lynn lost between 20 to 30 per cent of its workforce with some crops simply being thrown away in 2021. 

Whether temporary visas for migrant workers can bridge the gap and for how long is far from clear; either way, higher costs and in turn higher prices will be waiting on the other side of the bridge; enhanced national food security will not come cheap.

Of the longer-term challenges for the region, climate change is of course the most concerning; but it is also the most difficult to estimate in terms of localised impact. Reputable research bodies have forecast that at current levels of mitigation the fenlands will form the major part of the largest area of England anticipated to be below sea level by 2050. Across the North Sea and along the coastline from the Scheldt estuary in Belgium northwards to the Netherlands and Denmark, a similar pattern is likely to emerge over the same timeframe. But the difference is that the Dutch especially have the greatest expertise and are probably better prepared — or plan to be —than others. 

Considerable faith is being placed around The Wash in what is termed “soft” environmental engineering rather than dyke construction. Will that be sufficient in the face of anticipated — and possibly underestimated — rises in sea level over the next thirty years? Might there not be some more radical, if highly expensive, alternatives?

At various times since 1970, the possibility of constructing a barrier across The Wash has been mooted. In 2008 there was a tentative exploration but it quickly hit local resistance, not least in terms of its assessed environmental impact. As the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) — the most vehement opponent of a barrier — has often underscored, the marshes and sandbanks in and around The Wash support thousands of wildfowl and waders, especially migrant species. Would careful analysis suggest a way to reconcile the need for protection of nature reserves and related protected areas with curtailing the local impact of rising sea levels over the next three decades? In any event, the financial cost of constructing a barrier across The Wash would be very considerable indeed, recent estimates suggesting a minimum of £25 billion. Could these high costs be justified if there were additional benefits in terms of capturing surge waters for energy production and conservation?  This is an exceedingly complex policy area with perhaps irreconcilable elements; but might a Prime Minister much attracted to “grands projets” find it worthwhile to look at this again?

What links all these local challenges together is an ongoing search for enhanced national resilience in terms of food production and energy generation whilst preserving the natural world and the balance it reflects. All these dimensions can be seen to coalesce in the fenlands and in their relationship with the invaluable eco-system flourishing in and around The Wash estuary. One thing is clear: the challenges won’t go away and the sea won’t oblige us by not rising as anticipated by 2050.

Over many millennia the fenlands have proven to be great survivors. If visitors climb the 81 metre tower of St Botolph’s church in Boston in the middle of the Fens, their eyes can roam far and wide out to the far edges of The Wash in North Norfolk. The imposing medieval church has silently witnessed the many changes needed to preserve the fenlands from the 16th century onwards. The question now is whether that inheritance can be preserved and enriched in the decades ahead or whether the sea might finally “win” the battle with the land.