The draining of the Great Level
Witcham stands on a low island of clay in the peat fen of the Isle of Ely — for centuries a place ringed by seasonal marsh, its people living half by the land and half by the water: fishing and fowling, cutting reed and turf, grazing stock on the summer fen.
In Thomas Barber's own lifetime that world was remade. From the 1630s Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford, and his 'adventurers' set the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to drain the Great Level; his second cut, the New Bedford River — the Hundred Foot Drain — was completed in 1652, carrying the Ouse dead straight across the fen between banks a hundred feet apart. Marsh became farmland, parcelled out and given names.
The Barbers' few acres carry that drainage in their very names. 'The Dams Heads,' the close Thomas left his son, was ground at the head of the new banks; the two and a half acres a later Barber would leave an infant son lay 'in the pools abutting on the 100ft' — hard against Vermuyden's cut. The first land this family owned was land the age had only just made.
Composed for this site from published local history — the family’s world, not one of Mum’s records.