- How a Flash Is Made
- The Drowned Hamlet
- Who Fishes Them
- What the Flashes Have Given Up
- Where the Two Countries Meet
- The Bournes the Pits Stopped
- What the Swallows Take Now
“It went in a night. I heard it from four miles and I thought it was thunder, and in the morning there was forty acres of water where there had been a farm and a lane.”
How a Flash Is Made
The county holds lakes that no map of a century ago shows, lakes that were neither dug nor intended, and it calls them the flashes. Between nine and fourteen of them lie in the coal country, according to how a flash is counted, and of everything the coal and its pits have done to the High South they are the consequence most plainly to be seen. Yet no account of this county has ever mentioned them. They are not forgotten; they were never written.
A flash is made when ground over worked coal settles into a hollow, and the hollow fills. Nothing is brought to it. The water is the ordinary water of the country, which was draining away and is now standing, so that what was a field is a mere without anybody having decided it should be. It happens two ways, the sudden and the slow, and Skerrit’s point is the one to hold: the sudden are memorable and rare; the slow are the great majority, and are what most of the flash country actually is. The largest lies at the Sarr levels and covers something over four hundred acres in a wet year. In 4570 it was seven separate ponds. By 4590 it was one water, and for twenty years it has stood at about its present extent, over ground the papers still call farmland: Osbert Ridley’s family farmed a hundred and ten acres of what is now the middle of it, and holds papers for ground that has lain under six feet of water since before he was born.
Ownership is the first difficulty. Ground under water remains somebody’s on paper, but its boundaries lie beneath the surface, no survey has followed the flooding, and the drove courts have repeatedly declined to determine a line they cannot walk. The Bank Council owns coal beneath several flashes without claiming the water above. In practice the county treats the waters as common facts laid over private titles.
The principal flashes are known by local names rather than by any official map. The Sarr Levels Flash is the great water, more than four hundred acres in wet years. Seven Gates Flash took its name from the hedge gates that reappear in drought along a drowned lane. Dead Elm Water is ringed by black trunks standing where two field boundaries went under. Redbank Flash carries an iron-red margin after rain from the disturbed ground above Redlode. Bellman’s Water is smaller and deeper, with one drowned cottage chimney showing in dry summers; the name is older than the water and nobody now agrees whose bellman it remembers. Lower Tin Flash, nearest the waste, is shallow, reed-thick and worked for eels. Netherlode Water stands apart from all of them, not because it is larger but because nobody works it.
A company arriving from either city should see the flashes early, because they make the county’s changed ground legible at a glance. They do not look like proper lakes. Hedge-lines enter the water and emerge on the far side; fences, dead trees, road banks and occasionally a gable remain where the dry country used to be. Around them new fishing custom, salvage habit and boundary quarrels have grown within living memory, while the old titles remain exactly where they were.
The Drowned Hamlet
“Eleven houses, a smithy and a chapel. The chapel roof was out of the water until 4604 and then it was not. We walk the bounds every year and the bounds go round the water now, and nobody has ever said we should stop.”
Netherlode was a hamlet of eleven houses on the Blackdown edge, and it drowned slowly, not in a night but over years. It began to move in the 4580s, lay substantially under water by 4596, and the last household left in 4599; it was drowned before it was empty. Yet it is still a parish. It is still on the chapter’s roll, its bounds are still walked, and of everything in this county it is the most remarkable thing that nobody outside four miles of it has heard of.
What survives is the paper and the observance. The chapter has never dissolved the parish, for dissolving one requires a procedure nobody has begun. The proctor takes an annual return, which Nicholas Ferrers files and which records nothing. And Blackdown walks Netherlode’s bounds every year with its own, a walk that takes two hours more and goes round rather than across about half of them, the half that lies drowned.
Why they walk them is the question, and the answer differs by who is asked. Silas Pring’s is that the bounds have always been walked, and that stopping would be a decision somebody would have to make. The older people of Blackdown give another answer: that the obligations of a parish do not end because the parish is drowned, which is what the valleys say of a concord in terms. One answer is given readily, and the other is not.
The drowned hamlet held a chapel of ease, a smithy, an unplanned well and a churchyard beside attested unconsecrated ground. The difficulty is the churchyard: it lies under about eleven feet of water, its dead were never lifted, and no rite preceded the flooding. Netherlode had years of warning and no authority whose business it was to act on them.
The Black Lantern house has been asked twice, and twice has not attended. Brother Anselm’s recorded position is that the house acts on a request from a parish, and that Netherlode has no incumbent to make one: correct, and also the kind of answer the county has learned to read carefully. Blackdown has offered to make the request on Netherlode’s behalf. It has been told that this is not provided for.
For a company Netherlode is the clearest single commission in the county, and it has stood open for twenty years. Somebody will eventually pay to establish what is in that water, whether an antiquary, an insurer, the chapter if it is ever embarrassed into it, or a family. Everything about it is difficult, and none of the difficulty is danger. It is that nobody has standing to ask, nor anybody to permit, and the only body that could act will not act without a request that cannot be made; so that the dead lie under eleven feet of cold water, in a parish that still exists, waiting on a form of words.
Who Fishes Them
“Eels, mostly, and a coarse fish nobody eats in the two cities and everybody eats here. Four families work the big flash and we have never once quarrelled about it, which is more than the meres can say.”
Most flashes are worked by families who came to them within two generations: eels, coarse winter fish and reed for the Cambridge benches. That recentness matters. Unlike older waters elsewhere in the belt, these have living memories of first boats, first rights and first arguments, so custom remains visible while it is being made.
No licence governs them, no rotation, no custom of any age, and no court with jurisdiction, and Reuben Prole’s observation is exact: the flash trade is neither licensed nor unlicensed. The four families have made their own arrangement in the last forty years, whereby the water is divided rather than the season. It has held without a quarrel, and it is the only body of custom in the belt whose entire history is known.
Which is why the county watches them. The mere families and the spring households of the belt hold their ground by immemorial right that nobody can examine; the flash families hold theirs not by right but by an arrangement, made by people whose children are alive. If it fails, everybody in the belt will have watched a custom fail from its beginning, which has never happened before.
What the families will not do is the familiar part. Nobody works the big flash after dark. Nobody takes within about eighty yards of the three places where a drowned building stands out of the water. And nobody at all goes onto the Netherlode water, a separate flash of some sixty acres, which Hanne Ridley describes as not being fished, in a form of words that says less that the question was never raised than that it has been settled.
For a company, therefore, the flash families are the easiest people in the county to hire and the hardest to hire for the one thing anybody wants. They will take a party out cheaply, on any water but one. To get onto the Netherlode water a company must either bring a boat of its own, which is buyable at Blackdown and will be remarked on, or persuade somebody whose refusal is not about money, and so cannot be met with it.
What the Flashes Have Given Up
“Four things in nineteen years. A cart, a gate, and two I put back. I am not going to tell you what the two were and I am not going to be asked again.”
Less a lake than a drowned landscape, a flash keeps everything that stood on the ground when the water came, and keeps it where it stood, silent and unseen. In an ordinary year nobody has to think of that. In a dry summer the level drops by as much as four feet, and the county is reminded; that has happened four times since 4580.
The things that come up are mostly agricultural and mostly sad: gates, hurdles, the iron of a cart, a plough, the sill of a doorway. The flash families take the metal, which the county regards as entirely proper, and as the nearest thing the flashes have to a salvage custom. Nobody has suggested regulating it. No authority has jurisdiction to.
The things that come up at Netherlode are another matter, and the dry summer of 4611 is the one the county remembers. The water fell far enough to show the chapel gable and about nine yards of what had been the lane. Nothing was taken. Nobody went out onto it. Silas Pring walked the shore with two men from Blackdown, which he describes as the parish satisfying itself, and in the September the level rose again and the drowned lane went back under.
Hanne Ridley’s four things are the only itemised record anybody keeps, and her refusal about the two is the most-discussed sentence in the flash country. She has said she put them back; she has said where, in general terms; and she has said she would do the same again. The Concord of Saint Winnow took a deposition from her in 4614. It is in the Roll, and the Roll does not summarise it, which is the treatment the Concord reserves for a term still live.
What the next dry summer will show is a real question rather than a rhetorical one, for the levels are still falling in the flashes over the newer subsidence and rising in the older. Skerrit’s expectation is that the Netherlode water will stand at its 4611 level again within fifteen years and lower than that within forty, and that the churchyard lies at the shallow end. Of all the county’s commissions this is the slowest-moving, and the one likeliest to become urgent without anybody deciding anything. There will be a dry summer; the water will fall; something will be visible that has not been visible before, in a parish with no incumbent, on ground nobody owns, over the graves of dead nobody has counted; and the four bodies that might act will discover in the same fortnight that none of them can.
Where the Two Countries Meet
“Above the line it is sheep and bournes and stone walls and it looks like the valleys. Below it is coal and engines and it looks like nothing else in Britannia. You can stand with a foot on each and I have taken visitors to do it.”
Two countries make the Sarrum county, and the line between them is drawn by the ground rather than by any reeve. North and west the chalk comes to the surface and the country is pasture, bourne and stone. South and east the coal measures lie over the chalk and the county becomes the country of pits, deep iron and worked water. The ordinary seams are broad enough to shape villages. The green coal is not: it lies in narrow deeper measures around Blackdown and the New Lode, and its rarity is the reason a few fenced acres now matter to Westminster more than whole valleys of common coal.
What sets this county apart from the belt’s valleys is that its chalk has been gone through. The belt’s chalk is intact: it takes water at a swallow hole and gives it back at a spring, on a system nobody has mapped and everybody relies on. This county’s chalk has been broken through by some hundreds of shafts, adits and drainage levels driven since 4460, every one cut to reach what lies above or below and none to do anything about the water; so that each is a hole in a system that was never designed to have holes in it.
The consequences are three. Bournes that have stopped or moved. Swallow holes whose far end is now a working rather than a spring. And a great deal of chalk country whose water is governed by pumping decisions taken at Blackdown by people who were never asked to consider it. Alice Prowse’s office is the only one that looks at any of this, yet it looks without powers: the Water Court’s writ covers water, so that a bourne is within it; the pumping is a licensed engine on private ground, which is not. She has made four representations to the Bank Council in nine years, all courteous, all acknowledged, none answered on the substance.
What the two countries make of each other is the ordinary Sarrum arrangement of mutual contempt and mutual dependence. The Wold shoulder regards the coal country as ruined ground and its people as having sold something. The coal country regards the Wold as four hundred people and nine thousand sheep sitting on ground that would keep a pit village. Elias Wardell walks flocks across the line twice a year. Both sides, he says, are perfectly civil to him, and to nobody else.
The Bournes the Pits Stopped
“It ran every winter of my grandmother’s life and it has not run since 4589. There is no mystery about it. They put an engine in at Blackdown and took the water out from underneath, and every soul in this parish knows it and there is nothing whatever we can do.”
The belt keeps winterbournes, and a bourne running out of season is the region’s clearest omen. This county has the other case, which is worse, and is not an omen but a fact: bournes that have shortened, moved or stopped because the pits have pumped away the water beneath them, and everybody knowing exactly why.
Four bournes on the Wold shoulder are affected, and the record is unusually good, because Editha Prole and her mother kept dates for sixty-one years. Two have shortened by between three and six weeks at each end. One rises now about half a mile below where it rose in 4570. And the Combe Bourne itself, which gave the parish its name, has not run at all since 4589. Its bed is a lane.
What makes this a matter of the unseen rather than of drainage is what a parish is left holding. The observances of the valleys, and of the realm at large, are made at particular places at particular times, and four of Combe Bourne’s were made at the bourne head. The head is dry. Yet the parish has gone on making them at the dry head for thirty-one years, which Hanne Stallard describes without embarrassment as the only thing left that they can do.
Whether that answers is a question on which the parish keeps silence, and one the Concord of Saint Winnow has, unusually, taken an interest in. A roll entry for Combe Bourne dated 4601 records a visit and records no term, which in the Concord’s practice means either that nothing was needed or that nothing could be arranged, and the entry does not say which. Quire’s successors have not revisited it, and the parish has not asked.
The legal difficulty is simple and brutal: a licensed engine dewatering private ground is lawful, while a bourne is not property and no parish owns water it once received. The Water Court can order a watercourse and cannot order the return of one that has vanished. Combe Bourne is the clearest case.
For a company Combe Bourne is where the county’s two worlds produce work that neither can handle. The parish wants somebody to establish that the engine did it, which is not in doubt and would not help. What it needs is somebody to find out what the four observances were for, and whether there is another place to make them: Concord work, which the Concord has declined, and which is therefore left to whoever will take it.
What the Swallows Take Now
“A swallow hole took water and gave it to a spring and that was the arrangement for as long as there was anybody. Now four of them give it to a working, and what comes out at the bottom of a working is not what came out at a spring.”
The chalk’s swallow holes work as a system: water goes in, and comes out at a spring that three dye trials in a century have established and one has not. This county has that system with holes cut through it, and at least four of its swallows now discharge into workings rather than into anything anybody intended.
How this was discovered is the best piece of work anybody has done in the county, and it was done by accident. Blackdown’s number three level had been pumping far more water than the seam accounted for, and had been for eleven years, treated as a nuisance and costed as one. Joan Skerrit, setting the pumped volume against the rainfall over the Wold shoulder, established in 4614 that the level was draining a catchment three miles across on the far side of the line.
What that means for the surface is not fully worked out, and Prowse is the only person attempting it. Water that used to emerge at a spring now emerges at a pit sump, is pumped, and is discharged into the Sarr. Two springs on the Wold shoulder have failed since 4600 and a third is intermittent; the households on them are this county’s equivalent of the belt’s spring households, and two of the four have gone.
The reverse case exists, and is worse. A working that is abandoned is not pumped, and an abandoned working joined to a swallow hole fills. The county has at least two drowned levels fed by the Wold, therefore permanently full and permanently moving in the dark, which is a different thing from a level that merely holds water. Kite will not go into either. He has said that no consideration would take him.
What goes into a swallow hole in this county therefore no longer goes where it went, and Prowse has stated the consequence in her book because nobody else will. The belt has put down its swallow holes whatever it wished to be rid of, for as long as it has had anything to be rid of, and the Concord has always disapproved. Four of this county’s swallows now discharge into pits that men go down into.
A company should treat this as the county’s single most reliable source of a bad surprise. Water met in a pit or a level here may have come from anywhere within four miles on the far side of a geological line, carrying whatever was put into it by anybody, at an interval nobody can predict. Skerrit will give the four known connections to anybody who asks, and is entirely clear that four is less the number existing than the number established.