Old Bedford River
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The Old Bedford River is an artificial, partial diversion of the waters of the River Great Ouse in the Fens of Cambridgeshire, England. It was named after the Francis, Earl of Bedford who, as one of Charles I's drainage contractors in the Fens, financed the construction of this man-made canal or "cut" in the first half of the 17th century.
The engineer supervising the construction was Cornelius Vermuyden. The work was done in the 1630s, as part of the scheme to drain the Bedford Levels.
The artificial drainage of wetlands lying at an altitude close to sea-level is undertaken in two parts.
- The water from the higher land around is carried through the lowland without actually entering it.
- The water which leaks from the first system together with precipitation directly onto the lowland is drained off at low tide or pumped out.
The Old Bedford River is part of the former as it applies in the Bedford Levels. It carries upland water between the South and the Middle Bedford Levels from the Great Ouse at Earith, to the tidal part of the Great Ouse at Denver Sluice.
The flow in the Great Ouse is maintained for navigation, fisheries and aesthetic reasons but when there is excessive flow, the excess is diverted along the Bedford Rivers of which there are two, the Old and the New. Between them lies The Ouse Wash. This is not to be confused with the estuarine feature of The Wash towards which all this water is flowing. The Ouse Wash is an area in which excess fresh river water is stored until low tide permits its release or until flood levels elsewhere allow. The two rivers have raised banks (which in some parts of the world, would be called levees), so as to keep the flow within them but the outer bank in each case is higher so that when the flow becomes too great, the rivers fill the wash between them but not the farmland of the Middle and South Bedford Levels outside the banks.
To facilitate the drainage of the washland, there is a third, unembanked river between the two Bedford Rivers, alongside the Old Bedford River and known as the River Delph. It drains into the New Bedford River two or three kilometres south of Denver Sluice.
