3-008-996 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Inundation in the Fens: the blown sluice at the Marshland Drain, 1862. View of '...the remains of the Smee or Fen Drain sluice, which was built to let the water of drainage flow into the Ouse or Eau Brink Cut at low water...the North Sea attempted again, two weeks since, to regain the dominion which has been snatched from it by bearing down and overleaping the embankments of the inclosure...The chief suffering will fall upon a large number of small farmers, who must be very much distressed, if not ruined. It seems to be somewhat surprising that men have the hardihood to live and to invest their treasure upon a spot liable at any moment to be overtaken thus suddenly by ruin...The...[inundations] have produced a sense of great insecurity, and those who never seemed to realise the fact of their living six feet below high-water mark are now generally complaining that "they shall never again feel safe in Marshland"...In the spring of the year the great sluice on the Middle-level drain, which also guards that channel from the intrusion of the tide through the Ouse, and is a little way only from the Smee sluice, gave way, and, in consequence, some nine square miles of fertile grain-bearing land, with growing crops upon it, was deluged'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.