Earthwork, waterwork and the labours of drainage in an early modern English lowland

This chapter considers the drainage of the Somerset levels from the perspective of work. For centuries, the agricultural exploitation of the Somerset Levels has required the ongoing work of many hands to move earth, water and silt due to the strong tidal influence on the region’s rivers, their high sediment load and the size of the catchment. Yet histories of drainage are typically histories of schemes and schemers – of planning, engineering, opposition and resistance, and, eventually, long slow moves towards the desiccation of a landscape or region. In these histories, and the schemes they have focused on, the everyday earth- and water-work of drainage has been peripheral. The routine, seasonal and manual tasks of digging ditches, cutting weeds and controlling sluices, and the muddy hands and wet feet doing this work, have been obscured in favour of the large-scale and the infrastructural. This chapter foregrounds the routine work that has made the Somerset Levels using historical documents and oral histories, charting the changing nature of the work of drainage. Then it considers how this work has been imagined and obscured in schemes for the improvement of drainage over the last two centuries, as the problem of flooding has come to be conceived as one that could be solved with engineering and infrastructure. Often such projects have sought to design out a need for ongoing labour, have underestimated the need for ongoing labour or have suffered in the long run from the forgetting of the labour required for their maintenance. This chapter then encourages us to think of Somerset Levels not as a landscape made by a series of successive and discrete interventions, but as a landscape which has always been in the making, and unmaking, by the doing and not doing of routine, seasonal and manual labour.