The Dark Mountain Blog
The drowned world
posted by Paul Kingsnorth
15th July, 2010
Here in Cumbria, in the far north west of England, we’ve been experiencing what are called ‘extreme weather events’ for nearly a year. Compared to what, say, the Caribbean coast experiences every year, these ‘events’ are pretty small beer, but for England, a country whose landscape is a lot more modest than its politicians or its football team, they count as extreme.
Last autumn we had the biggest floods in living memory. People were helicoptered out of their houses and entire towns disappeared under eight feet of burst river. Then we had the hardest winter for decades, in which the roads were sheets of ice for weeks and I regularly had to ask the farmer to tow me up the hill with his tractor because my van wouldn’t make it. Now we are in the middle of the driest summer since 1929.
While this is bad news for my struggling broad beans, it does allow a rare glimpse of a drowned past. The levels of Haweswater, the easternmost lake of the Lake District, are currently exceptionally low, and this has brought the ghost village of Mardale Green up into the light for the first time in decades.
The story of Mardale Green has entranced me since I first heard it as a child, when I walked in the valley. Haweswater is today a long, empty stretch of water in a valley whose only outstanding features are spiritless squares of plantation pines. In some lights it’s an eerie place; you can feel some kind of loss there, an emptiness that hangs around in the air. There’s a reason for this, and it’s below the water’s surface. This lake did not used to be here.
In its natural state, Haweswater was two smaller lakes known as High and Low Water, which were separated by a narrow spit of land. They were fringed by trees and meadows, and their shores were dotted with farmsteads. At the head of the valley stood the village of Mardale Green, with its typical cluster of Westmorland stone houses, a medieval church and an inn, the Dun Bull.
images from Mardale Green
Haweswater’s valley is a dead end: there is no way, except on foot, to cross the mountain ridge known as High Street which blocks it at its western end (though the Romans managed to build a road that today still runs along this ridge; it’s a giddying achievement, often literally.) Haweswater’s isolated valley community, its landscape and history, were by no means unique in this region; in many ways it was typical of Lakeland life before the coming of modernity. It was tethered to its place and to its lineage, and many of its people knew nothing else.
I wonder, then, how the villagers felt in 1919 when they heard that the Manchester Water Corporation had secured the passing of the Haweswater Act, enabling the compulsory purchase of the valley, the construction of a dam at its eastern end and the drowning of everything in the vicinity, including Mardale Green. I wonder at the clash of cultures; at the how the coming loss was conceived and assimilated by the farming families, the hunters and the shepherds whose water came from the local becks and who had no telephone lines or electricity. The new reservoir was being built to provide drinking water for the burgeoning population of the city of Manchester. For the city to grow, a village, and a way of life, had to die.
It was all a painted miniature: progress in a nutshell. Vast armies of labourers were brought in to build the dam as the locals looked on. A new village was built to house the workers and their families, for the Haweswater project would take years. Unlike the existing village, this new, 20th century prefab settlement had electricity, pool tables, radios, washing machines – all of the promises which the new age was bringing. Construction of the dam took ten years. During that time, life in Mardale Green went on as it had for centuries, only now with the shadow of its own end hanging over it, lengthening by the day.
The dam’s plug was finally set two decades after the project had been given the go-ahead. Most of the village’s buildings were blown up by the Royal Engineers before the flood. The Holy Trinity church held an emotional last service for the villagers which was also attended by hundreds of people from outside the valley – so many that most had to listen to Mardale’s farewell outside on the grass through speakers rigged up by a local radio ham. The church was then dismantled stone by stone. Bodies were dug up from the churchyard and re-interred in nearby Shap. Some of the stone was used to build the take-off tower for the new reservoir, in which the old church windows can still be seen.
The waters swallowed Mardale Green in 1939, as the world’s first fully-industrialised war swallowed Western civilisation. Today, in 2010, the old stone walls that surrounded the pastures, and the shells of some of the old buildings, have come up into the light again above the lowered surface of Haweswater. The old fields are bleached white, and the remains of the drystone walls are black and slimy.
Manchester is worrying again about its water supply, and the response of the authorities has been to instruct the population of Cumbria to stop using hosepipes. Now, as then, the needs of the city dictate to the country.
What happened to Mardale Green is still happening, on an infinitely bigger scale and with more pain attached, across the planet. In China, more than 1.2 million people have been forcibly displaced to make way for the Three Gorges Dam: a dubious world record. In India, the Narmada Bachao Andolan have been fighting for decades to stop the Indian government building a series of over 3000 dams in the Narmada valley, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying pristine ecosystems.
The story is always the same. An expanding economy needs water, or electric power, or both. Dams and reservoirs are planned, in the interests of national development and economic competitiveness. Villagers whose lifestyles are genuinely ‘low impact’ and ‘sustainable’ are barged out of the way, often in the most horrific circumstances, by a metastasising urban culture which claims to want to be both of these things but is not willing to pay the hard price. The city eats the country.
The line from the authorities is always the same too: this is for everyone’s benefit. The reality is usually different; the power and the piped water goes to the industrial areas, the cities, the rich suburbs. The refugees from the country go to the slums. Who notices? Who reports it? A few genuine journalists and passionate campaigners, but most of us never hear of these things, or care if we do.
It wasn’t very long ago that, after decades of campaigning by activists all over the world, the global organisations which had long supported and funded dam-building began to have second thoughts. Demonstrations of the destructive ecological and social impacts of mega-dams were just too big too ignore. They were not, however, as big as the demand for the power and water that dams provide the ever-spreading Machine. Today, mega-dams are as popular as ever, and are often dressed up as yet another ‘renewable solution’ to the climate change caused by the development model they were originally part of. It’s the same old mutton, now dressed up as low-carbon lamb, and we are still hooked on it. It gives us – some of us – power, order, control, national pride. It allows us to grow, for a while. We can drown the past, and much of the inconvenient present, under hundreds of feet of water and hope it never rises again to show us what’s beneath the surface.
Strangely, as I have been writing this it’s started to rain outside; the first rain in weeks. It’s heavy and fresh. What can be seen of Mardale Green will be no doubt be gone again soon, and Manchester will be able to breathe easier. Here in Cumbria we’ll be able to use our hosepipes to wash our cars down and water our herbaceous borders without having to worry about it. Everything will go back to normal.
Posted by Paul Kingsnorth on 15 July, 10
Posted in: Blog
Comments: 19 comments - Read them and respond
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The good thing about peak oil is that the current normalacy will slowly change – you need energy to stuff up the planet and we will have less of it – much less over time.
I always remember a quote that a huge nuclear exchange that wipes out the human population would cause less ecological damage than 100 more years of human habitation…it could even be 50 years and the quote is around 20 odd years old!!!
Keep up the good work…
Thanks for bringing this story home, Paul. I was aware of such goings-on ‘out there’ in the Third World but it shocked me to hear how recently the same crimes were being perpetrated on ‘our’ own soils.
You say ‘the locals looked on’, but is that all they did or is there another story here about resistance comparable to Narmada et al.? So much more depressing if it turns out they just took it on the chin…
I remember reading a placard by another drowned landscape in the Brecons talking about ‘sustainable energy’ derived from the subsequent waterflow. I startled my companion with my cursing when it became apparent that all of this energy was being piped directly into one of the bigger Welsh cities. Sustainable my arse! I think energy has to stay close to its source (not siphoned off in industrial mega-projects to fuel the growth of the cities) if people are to use it in a truly sustainable manner.
Great article Paul.
The fact you said it was raining reminded me it was St Swithin’s Day
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Swithin%27s_Day
So we can all enjoy watering our borders, washing our cars and hosing down our parched lawns of denial for another 40 days at least!
Hmm, some people in Wales did take direct action to resist…
“The construction led to an increase in support in the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, and sharpened debate within the party about the use of direct action. Plaid emphasised its constitutional approach to stopping the development, however some members frustrated with their inability to stop the development by attempting to sabotage the power supply at the site of the dam in 1962.
A more serious repercussion was the formation of the militant group, Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (Welsh Defence Movement) or MAC, which blew up a transformer on the dam construction site in February 1963. MAC would carry out a number of bombings between 1963 and 1969, many of which were directed towards water and power infrastructure ;however they also bombed the Temple of Peace and Health in Cardiff’s civic centre, a tax office in Cardiff, the Welsh Office building in the same city. In 1969 two members, Alwyn Jones and George Taylor, attempted to sabotage the investiture of the Prince of Wales by bombing the railway line at Abergele on which the royal carriage would travel, but were killed when their bomb exploded prematurely. In 1963 a second militant group, Byddin Rhyddid Cymru (Free Wales Army) were established in response the perceived lacklustre efforts of MAF.”
http://www.summitpost.org/image/452944/325853/cofiwch-dryweryn.html
“In 1966, on 6th March, an Improvised Explosive Device [IED] exploded on the site of the Vesenoic, which like so many of these acts by such groups in Wales, was more symbolic than effective. For all that, a repair bill of GBP36000 and six weeks loss of work is symbolism by anyone’s standards.”
http://www.cvni.net/radio/e2k/e2k025/e2k25article.html
“The Birmingham Corporation agreed and an Act of Parliament was passed for the compulsory purchase of the total water catchment area of the Elan and Claerwen Valleys.
In 1893 the building work began.
100 occupants of the Elan Valley had to move, only landowners received compensation payments. Many buildings were demolished, 3 manor houses, 18 farms, a school and a church (which was replaced by the corporation as the Nantgwyllt Church).
A railway line was constructed to transport the workers and thousands of tonnes of building material each day. This took three years.
A village of wooden huts was purpose built to house most of the workers on the site of the present Elan Village
New workers spent a night in the dosshouse to be deloused and examined for infectious diseases, only then were they allowed across the river to the village. Single men lived in groups of eight in a terrace house shared with a man and his wife.
A school was provided for those under 11, after this they were expected to work.
The village employed a guard to look out for illegal importation of liquor and unauthorised visitors.
There was a hospital for injuries and an isolation hospital. A bath house which the men could use up to 3 times a week but the women only once!
The pub was for men only. Other facilities included a library, public hall, shop and canteen. There was even street lighting (powered by hydroelectric generators).”
http://www.elanvalley.org.uk/dams-reservoirs/history-of-the-dams/
“The construction of the Vyrnwy dam and lake meant that the Llanwddyn community had to be moved and re-housed, while the buildings were demolished and the village flooded.”
http://www.powys.gov.uk/index.php?id=3958&L=0
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This word “sustainable.” It’s used everywhere but is nowhere defined. It implies a steady state economy that is theoretically in balance and can be sustained over a long period of time, but ends up sustaining the same old myth of progress.
To me true sustainability means sustaining not the human enterprise, but the non human enterprises that surround us.
As Paul says, no one is willing to pay the true price of a real sustainbility. And yet, as far as I can tell, environmentalism isn’t really asking anyone to.
Fascinating stuff Wolfbird. Ian M – there were big protests about the Haweswater project, and not just from the villagers: it seems to have become something of a national issue for a time. But it never spilled over into direct action, and if you’ve ever met a Cumbrian farmer you’ll know why! There does seem to have been a clear sense, though, that this was a desecration which shouldn’t be put into words.
“They’re making more people every day, but they ain’t makin’ any more dirt.”
— Will Rogers
Ah… an eloquent, sad-beautiful story. Cities always survive by plundering the hinterlands. And those cityfolk who know and deplore this are compromised by their utter dependence on this plunder continuing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fkn1KWP8xI&feature=player_embedded#!
“The drowning of the village of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn valley was one of the most important political events in Wales in the twentieth century,” said BBC Wales Welsh affairs editor Vaughan Roderick.
http://www.llgc.org.uk/ymgyrchu/Dwr/Diwydiant/index-e.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4332312.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4331812.stm
“Percy Shelley – the idealist, revolutionary and great romantic poet
– first visited his uncle’s estate in the Elan when he was 18, walking
there from Sussex over the course of a week. Already having a
reputation as a strange but fun-filled young man, he used to bathe
in the mountain streams and sail toy boats down the currents,
sometimes with a cat on board. He fell in love in the valley and tried
to make a life there with his first wife but when they failed to acquire a
house the marriage collapsed. She drowned herself in the Serpentine
in London two years later. He lost his life at sea in Italy aged 29.
The Elan stream in which Shelley used to bathe and both the
valley homes he loved so much – Cwm Elan and the manor house
Nangwyllt – were also drowned by a series of Victorian reservoirs
in the late nineteenth century.”
http://www.wildswimming.co.uk/wales1.html
“Mr. Davies told me, ‘The drowning of the valley is a tragedy. It is as valuable as an Old Master.
This is an act of vandalism. A precious piece of Welsh heritage is being destroyed.”
Mr. Louis Hurley, an Abergavenny architect who owns a holiday cottage near the valley, said “One can never fight an authority on amenity grounds in this country, only on economic grounds.
“If economic values are the only values, everything will go. For detailed river scenery you will never find another valley like it in the country,”
“Before the area is flooded, wildlife and botanical surveys will be carried out and the valley will be photographed in detail.
Mr. Davies told me, “It will be a record for future generations to show what this generation has destroyed.”
http://www.rhandirmwyn.net/eng/resnewspaper2.htm
I think it’s probably impossible for city folk, or folk whose idea of a house is as a commodity, a temporary investment, to adequately comprehend what a farmhouse, a farm, a remote rural village, meant to people who had lived there for many, many generations, so that the surnames are as much a part of the landscape as ancient trees, tracks, stone walls… to have all that annihilated by force, for the benefit of industrial urban people speaking a faraway foreign language, is something more than sad…
Interesting to hear the story of Mardale Green.
There’s a similar case in North Yorkshire where the village of West End was swallowed up by Thruscross reservoir, originally planned in the 1890s but not finally created until 1966. Most of the buildings were demolished but old photos show that the church was initially left standing, with the water up to its eaves. It was later flattened, although apparently the stone bridge in the centre of the village still survives beneath the water.
There are a few ruins still visible – roofless farm buildings and houses just above the waterline, a fragment of a mill, drystone walls vanishing into the water. Recently the water level has been fairly low, and walking around the reservoir with a map I identified what I am fairly sure is the rear wall of the churchyard, temporarily visible.
Thruscross is the uppermost of the four reservoirs in the Washburn Valley, and is still much more raw than the Victorian three lower down the valley. These have now largely blended into the landscape; Thruscross, with its concrete dam and field boundaries disappearing into the dark, peat-laden water, has yet to do so.
There is also another great site here at http://www.mardale.green.talktalk.net which has an in depth story of this village, some of the pictures here look as if they could be from that site, I bet the owner of the site might want to know about it.
That’s a fascinating story, thanks.
The scrapping of the Sustainable Development Commission has led me to think about what sustainability actually means. The answer is not very much anymore. As you say, no-one is willing to pay the price, or even think about it as something that has meaning beyond platitudes.
Alan – yes, the pix are from that site, with acknowledgements (I have linked to it above.) Tried to contact the site’s owner but couldn’t work out how to, so I hoped they will not mind the borrowings and the invitation for people to visit them.
Sorry, I’m joining this discussion a bit late (probably after its finished, in fact) but I just wanted to say that I think this rural/urban dichotomy isn’t particularly helpful. Rural dwellers are just as urbanised as anyone else, in terms of lifestyle – we have to commute large distances to work, to school, to get healthcare, etc, so we tend to drive further than city dwellers. Some of us produce some of our own food, but on the whole we shop in supermarkets, we buy our clothes in the high street at the nearest big town – we work in offices, call centres and the services industry. Or if we can’t find work locally we go to live in a city. We watch DVDs on widescreen TVs, we have broadband, our children want a Nintendo DS. We heat our homes with gas or oil. We consume just as much if not more than our urban cousins.
People in cities need water (not that I am condoning the flooding of villages), they need food, it is unreasonable to expect a city to produce all of the commodities it needs within its own boundaries. It would also be unreasonable – and potentially very destructive, to expect city people to move to the country. Cities are actually quite efficient in a lot of ways – people don’t need to travel as much, higher density housing tends to be more energy efficient, and in some cities people can produce a lot of their own food on allotments and city farms.
Anyway its all very well saying we are rural and therefore part of the solution, and you are urban, and therefore part of the problem, but where does that get you? We all need to live on this small, crowded island / planet.
Sorry for coming back to this at such a late date. Thanks for the responses to my questions!
On the sustainability question, Derrick Jensen has some very sensible words, some of which you can see in this short video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8199834239551312732#
The key point he makes, to my mind: evolutionarily, the creatures that have survived in the long run have done so by enhancing their immediate environment to benefit the other communities living there. They give back more than they take. Think of an oak tree as an example: how much it gives in the way of shade, moisture, food, fertiliser, shelter. A supremely generous being – what can we learn from it?
Also, his critique of cities big enough to ‘require the importation of resources’ speaks to this topic of ‘plundering the hinterlands’ (as vera put it). It can’t last. It cannot be sustained.
best,
Ian
In the beginning just remember it was darked and then someone smiled! try this:
Why do they use sterile needles for lethal injections? :)
In all these near peotical lamentations for the lost world of Mardale, you miss a few points.
Haweswater Dam was built during a time of great economic depression and gave work to those, either forced or otherwise, that meant bread on the table, from honest toil and not begged from the Parish, as there was no Welfare State in those days.
When I say forced, I mean it in the sense of that you had no choice, work or starve.
It is easy for anyone, from afar, with 20-20 hindsight, whom were not there, to judge those people but I hope to redress the imbalanced perspective.
My bias..so that you should know:-
My Grandfather, was the Attendant-in-Charge of the Dynamo House.
My Great Uncle, was Blacksmith.
My Father, learned his trade there.
My proposal of marriage took place in Burnbanks.
My wife and I married, to the sounds of Holy Trinity church bells.
My daughters were Christened to those same bells.
My Fathers’ funereal cortege paused, as those bells pauled.
Do you get the idea that some of us, a few, have great affinity, to that place?
The Burnbanks Project is easily found online, with oral history, from my Uncle Tom and others, where you will hear, from people whom were there and not some other, with an agenda I cannot discern.
When asked asked to participate, my Father said, ‘Rightly or wrongly, it stands testament, to many a man, that was friend to me and died, yet no mention is made to them…therefore, in good conscience, I won’t be part of a ‘whitewashed’ history of my life.’
Ever the immutable object during my early years, even in later life, he would not allow me to record his days at Burnbanks.
My Mother has told me more but since this is ‘second-hand’, it would not be fair to relate it.
However, I do hold, in safe-keeping, some money, to erect a deer, not white-washed, in the valley of the dammed, as a final fotenote, to those whom lived and died there..
In the drought of ’76, the lanes of Mardale were exposed and my Father had this idea, how nice it would be, if that deer would appear, like a Loch Ness Monster and make people curious about us, the dam builders, long after we have gone.
And if you do not know the mysterious tale of the deer, then you do not know, Haweswater.
As Horace wrote, ‘the sins of the Father’..et cetera, Europides too, I will, within my lifetime, whether illegal or not, place upon the lanes of Mardale, a statue of a deer, as my Father bid me.
My youngest daughter, given the larger funds that I have, will do the same…
It is easy to think that dam was built by wholly local labour, not true. I am a polyglot, by virtue of that dam.
When you speak of that dam, choose you words with care, as some of us, owe our very existance to it, me for one.
pete_moore@myway.com
addendum..
The church bells, from Mardale, now hang in St.Barnabas Church, in the city of Carlisle, though few know that fact.
It being built, when times were hard, and pennies were few, to bring comfort to the masses.
You need to have a Father, like mine, to know the facts.
And so, each December 10th, for no apparent reason, the bells of St. Barnabos ring, at my behest..
For those that died, building that dam, on my Fathers’ birthday.