The Water and the Withy
Somerset’s Levels, Glastonbury’s Moors, and the People Who Keep the Wetland Alive
The Somerset Levels are not land in any conventional sense. They are a negotiation between land and water, sustained by human intervention, and the terms of that negotiation must be renegotiated every year or the water wins. Covering roughly 250 square miles of central Somerset between the Quantock Hills and the Mendips, the Levels sit at or below sea level for most of their extent. Left alone, they would be what they were before the medieval period: a vast tidal marshland, passable only by boat, habitable only on the low islands - Glastonbury, Athelney, Muchelney, Wedmore - that rise a few feet above the flood. Everything that makes the Levels usable - the grazing, the farming, the roads, the villages built on land that has no inherent right to be dry - is the product of a drainage system that must be operated, maintained, and defended against the water it holds back. The Levels are England’s most precarious managed landscape, and the people who keep them from reverting to swamp are among the least visible stewards in the country.
The drainage system that sustains the Levels is ancient in origin and industrial in scale. Its primary infrastructure is the rhyne - pronounced “reen” - a network of drainage ditches that cross-hatches the moors in a pattern as dense and deliberate as the veins in a leaf. There are hundreds of miles of rhynes on the Levels, ranging from narrow field ditches a few feet across to major arterial drains wide enough to carry a boat. They feed into rivers - the Parrett, the Brue, the Axe, the Tone - that carry the water to the sea at Bridgwater Bay. But the rivers alone cannot do the job. The land is too flat, the water table too high, the rainfall too persistent. So the system depends on pumping stations - once steam-driven, now diesel and electric - that lift water from the low-lying moors into the rivers and embanked channels that run above the surrounding land. Stop the pumps, and within weeks the fields become shallow lakes. This is not a hypothetical scenario. It has happened repeatedly, most catastrophically in the winter of 2013-14.
The Rhyne Clearers
A rhyne is not a ditch you dig once. It is a ditch you maintain forever. Every year, the vegetation that grows in and along the rhynes - common reed, bulrush, water mint, fool’s watercress, floating sweet-grass - must be cut back or the channel silts up, the flow slows, and the drainage capacity of the network diminishes. This is the work of the rhyne clearers, employed by the internal drainage boards that have managed the Levels’ water since the nineteenth century, inheriting a responsibility that stretches back to the medieval abbeys of Glastonbury and Muchelney.
The Axe Brue Internal Drainage Board and the Parrett Internal Drainage Board between them manage the majority of the rhyne network. Their operatives work year-round, moving from rhyne to rhyne with excavators, weed boats, and hand tools, clearing vegetation on a rotational basis that balances drainage efficiency against ecological value. The rhynes are not merely drains. They are habitats - home to water voles, eels, dragonflies, and a community of aquatic plants that has adapted to the particular chemistry of the peat-stained water. The clearers work one bank at a time, leaving the opposite bank undisturbed so that wildlife can retreat and recolonise. They know which rhynes hold water vole burrows, which ones support the last populations of the lesser silver water beetle, which ones will flood a road if left uncleared for a single season too long.
This knowledge is not written down in any comprehensive way. It exists in the heads of the operatives, accumulated over decades of working the same network. When a rhyne clearer retires, what leaves with him is not merely a set of skills but a mental map of the entire water system - where it is vulnerable, where it is resilient, where a blocked culvert under a drove road will back up water into thirty acres of grazing within a day. The drainage boards struggle to recruit replacements. The work is physically demanding, poorly understood by the public, and offers wages that compete unfavourably with less specialised employment. The system that keeps the Levels dry depends on institutional memory held by a shrinking number of people.
The Withy Growers
The withy beds of the Somerset Levels were once an industry. Withy is the local word for willow - specifically, the varieties of osier willow grown in managed beds for basket-making, hurdle-weaving, eel traps, lobster pots, and a hundred other products. The willow weavers who still work these beds are maintaining a craft and a landscape simultaneously that a pre-plastic economy required. The Levels were ideal for withy growing. The soil was rich, the water table high, the climate mild. By the late nineteenth century, thousands of acres of the Levels were under withy cultivation, and the towns of Burrowbridge, Stoke St Gregory, and North Curry were centres of a trade that employed hundreds of families.
Today, the Somerset withy industry has contracted to a handful of growers. The Coate family at Stoke St Gregory, the Musgrove Willows operation nearby, and a scattering of smaller producers maintain what remains of a tradition that once defined the economic life of the moors. The beds themselves are distinctive features of the Levels landscape - dense, geometric plantations of willow rods, cut to the stool every winter and harvested in bundles called bolts. The annual cycle is exacting. The rods are cut between November and March while the sap is down. They are sorted by length, stripped of bark if white willow is required, and dried in racks or boiled to produce buff willow. The craft of growing is inseparable from the craft of making. A good grower knows which varieties produce the best rods for which purpose: Black Maul for heavy baskets, Dicky Meadows for fine work, Champion Rod for coffin-making.
The ecological value of the withy beds extends well beyond their commercial product. A managed withy bed is a wetland habitat of considerable richness. The dense growth provides nesting sites for sedge warblers and reed buntings. The wet ground between the rows supports invertebrate communities that feed the Levels’ breeding wading birds. And the beds themselves act as natural flood attenuation, absorbing and holding water during peak rainfall in ways that engineered drainage cannot replicate. When withy beds are grubbed out and converted to improved grassland - as many have been since the 1950s - the Levels lose not only a crop and a tradition but a component of their own hydrological resilience. Every acre of withy that disappears is an acre that drains faster, floods sooner, and contributes more water to a system already operating at capacity.
The Peat and the Trackways
Beneath the surface of the Somerset Levels lies a record of human habitation that stretches back six thousand years. The peat that underlies the moors is not merely soil. It is a compressed archive - layers of sphagnum moss, reed, and sedge that accumulated over millennia in the waterlogged conditions of the post-glacial marsh. Within those layers, preserved by the anaerobic environment that prevents organic matter from decaying, are the remains of the people who first attempted to make the wetland navigable.
The Sweet Track, discovered in 1970 during commercial peat cutting near Shapwick, is the oldest known engineered road in the world. Dated by dendrochronology to the winter of 3807-3806 BC, it consisted of a raised walkway of ash, oak, and lime planks laid on a substructure of crossed poles, running for nearly two kilometres across the marsh between what is now Shapwick Burtle and the island of Westhay. Other trackways - the Post Track, the Abbot’s Way, the Eclipse Track - a sustained, sophisticated programme of wetland engineering by Neolithic and Bronze Age communities who understood the Levels as a resource to be managed, not an obstacle to be avoided.
These trackways survive only because the peat that entombs them remains wet. Drain the peat, and the wood oxidises and crumbles. Lower the water table, and six thousand years of archaeological evidence turns to dust. This is not a theoretical concern. Commercial peat extraction, which continued on the Levels until the late twentieth century, destroyed trackways and other archaeological deposits across thousands of acres. The shift from extraction to conservation - the creation of nature reserves on former peat workings at Shapwick Heath, Westhay Moor, and Ham Wall - has preserved what remains, but the peat itself continues to shrink. Drained peat oxidises, compacts, and wastes away at a rate of one to two centimetres per year. The Levels are, quite literally, sinking. The land surface today is lower than it was a century ago, which means the pumps must work harder, the rhynes must be cut deeper, and the margin between dry land and flood grows thinner with every passing decade.
The Flood
In the winter of 2013-14, the Somerset Levels flooded. Not the brief, manageable inundation that the moors experience most winters and that the farming calendar has always accommodated, but a sustained, catastrophic flood that submerged entire villages, displaced hundreds of families, and turned the Levels into an inland sea that persisted for months. Moorland, Muchelney, and Thorney were cut off. The A361 was impassable. Livestock drowned. The water did not fully recede until April.
The causes were multiple and disputed. Exceptional rainfall - the wettest January in England since records began in 1766 - overwhelmed a drainage system designed for ordinary winters. The Environment Agency, which had assumed responsibility for main river maintenance from the drainage boards, had reduced dredging of the Parrett and the Tone, allowing silt to accumulate in the channels and reducing their carrying capacity. High tides in Bridgwater Bay prevented the rivers from discharging at the coast. And the cumulative effects of peat wastage, land drainage upstream, and the loss of natural flood storage - including withy beds and unimproved wetland - had reduced the Levels’ capacity to absorb peak flows.
The aftermath brought a twenty-year flood action plan, the resumption of dredging on the Parrett and the Tone, and the construction of a new pumping station at Beer Wall. It also brought a renewed, if temporary, public awareness that the Somerset Levels exist only because people maintain them. The political attention faded. The funding cycles moved on. The rhyne clearers went back to work. The pumps continued running. The withy growers harvested their rods. The negotiation between land and water resumed its annual rhythm, watched by fewer people than ever.
The System
What the Somerset Levels demonstrate, more clearly than any other landscape in England, is that stewardship is not a single act but a system. The rhyne clearer, the pump operator, the withy grower, the farmer who grazes the moors in summer and moves his stock to higher ground in winter - these are not separate occupations engaged in unrelated work. They are components of a single, integrated management regime that keeps a quarter of a million acres of land above water. Remove any one component and the system degrades. Remove the rhyne clearers and the ditches silt up. Remove the pump operators and the moors flood. Remove the farmers and the grassland scrubs over. Remove the withy growers and the natural flood attenuation diminishes further.
The moor farmers themselves - the graziers who run beef cattle and sheep on the wet grasslands through the summer months - are stewards by necessity rather than title. Their grazing maintains the species-rich grassland of the Levels, which supports breeding lapwings, redshanks, snipe, and curlews in numbers found nowhere else in southern England. The grass must be grazed or it becomes rank and tussocky, unsuitable for ground-nesting birds. But the farmers can only graze the moors if the moors are drained sufficiently to support livestock without poaching the ground into mud. And the moors can only be drained if the rhynes are cleared and the pumps are running. The farmer depends on the rhyne clearer who depends on the drainage board who depends on the levies paid by the farmers. It is a closed loop of mutual dependence, and it has been running, in one form or another, since the Abbot of Glastonbury first ordered the marshes drained in the twelfth century.
The Levels are a test case for what happens when a society stops understanding a landscape as a maintained system and begins treating it as a given. The fields look permanent. The roads look permanent. The villages look as though they have always been there and always will be. But the water remembers what the land was, and given the opportunity - a pump failure, a neglected rhyne, a dredging programme deferred for a single budget cycle too many - it comes back. The water always comes back. The only question is whether, when it does, there will still be people on the Levels who know how to push it back again.