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Book Review
| Martin Mere: Lancashire's Lost Lake. By W. G. Hale and Audrey Coney. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. xvi + 264 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $25.
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| The coastal lowlands of Lancashire in northwest England are an environment of intensive agriculture, much of it market gardening on reclaimed peat moss. This book charts the story of one of these moss lands, the former lake of Martin Mere, fifteen miles north of Liverpool behind the coastal resort of Southport. The authors combine a digest of published work with the fruits of archival research and oral history to trace the environmental history of Martin Mere from the last glaciation to the present. The initial chapters discuss the evolution of the mere from the retreat of the ice to the medieval period. It is a complex history, in which sea level changes and their impact on the water table played a major part in determining the ecology of the mere basin as it fluctuated between open water and marsh. Archaeological evidence for early human activity and documentary evidence for the use and management of the fenland resources in the medieval centuries are used to paint a vivid picture of the exploitation of the rich pre-drainage environment: the mere yielded fish, wildfowl, reeds, and pasture. |
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The later chapters chart the attenuated process of draining the mere and the development of the newly drained landscape. Drainage began in earnest in 1694 when Thomas Fleetwood, a local landowner, took a lease of Martin Mere and cut a channel to drain the lake to the sea. Floodgates prevented water backing up at high tides, but silting soon became a problem. Further attempts were made to drain the mere in the 1780s, but it was not until steam pumping was introduced in 1850 that effective drainage was achieved. As in other areas of reclaimed fen, the lowering of the land surface as a result of peat shrinkage remained an endemic problem. Life on the farms established on the drained mere is recreated from photographs and oral testimony. Of particular interest is a chapter on the management of the former mere for shooting, detailing the raising of pheasants and the impact of gamekeeping on the local economy. |
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This is an attractive book, lavishly illustrated. However, the quality of reproduction of some of the pictures (many of which are important archive photographs) is disappointingly poor, as is that of some of the maps and diagrams, which often have been so reduced that legibility becomes a problem. Overall, a frustrating "muddiness" pervades the black-and-white illustrations. A large-scale reference map would have helped readers who are unfamiliar with Martin Mere and its environs. |
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Bill Hale and Audrey Coney have presented a detailed portrait of a distinctive local landscape. The wealth of local detail, the use of minor place-names (readily identifiable only to local residents) as reference points, and the limited amount of contextual material all suggest that the intended audience for the book is primarily among the local and regional community in Lancashire. But it contains much that will be of interest to environmental historians and will be a useful quarry for those interested in the relationship between human society and wetlands across the centuries. |
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Angus Winchester is head of history at Lancaster University, England. His research interests center on the history of resource management, particularly in the medieval and early modern periods, a theme explored in his book The Harvest of the Hills: Rural Life in Northern England the Scottish Borders 1400–1700 (Edinburgh University Press, 2000). |
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