Planning some truly debauched celebrations for my birthday tomorrow (i.e. getting up at 4.30 am to go birdwatching)
David Higgins
@davidhiggins.bsky.social
9K followers 3.3K following 2.6K posts
Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Leeds, UK. Working on culture and environmental crisis. Writing a book about birds, loss, and restoration. Worried parent. Luddite. Opinions my own. Reposts ≠ endorsement.
![Final page of final chapter of Rackham’s history of the countryside:
Marshes, fens, rivers and the sea
boundary which still follows the meanders.
in, a former watercourse may be kept on record in the shape of a parish The most familiar earthworks that go with rivers are mill-leats, canals which run paralel to a river but at a less gradient so as to gain a difference in height which drives a watermill. The technology goes back to Anglo-Saxon times.
Leats often survive the disuse of the mill. In Cambridge city, the river itself has been made into a mill eat, diverted by massive embankments to follow the edge
of a natural gravel terrace.
Fish-weirs are devices of Anglo-Saxon origin consisting of wooden fish-traps placed across the current between an island and one bank. The other side of the island was left open for navigation and for some fish to escape. Fish-weir islands were commonly artificial, placed to take advantage of natural gravel riffles. D.].
Pannett has found remains of forty fish-weirs, some of which still operated in the nineteenth century, on the Shropshire part of the Severn. 60s There was a similar device on the River Calder near Wakefield.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:nqu647dxieaalotdatjaol66/bafkreiek5bwxu2udkaekaxofnx3vx4vh7tng3hsnprywanfvxnczsx2pam)
