ABSTRACT
The windmill and scoop wheel were inadequate to deal with the steadily deteriorating conditions in the Fens, even with the widespread adoption of the double-lift system by which the water was raised part of the total lift into a second drain from which it was further pumped into the final drain. The notorious unreliability of the wind as a source of power meant that even the most efficient mills and wheels were often unable to \vork when most needed.3 The steam engine, although more consistent, suffered from failings other than that of unreliability, of course, of which the most obvious were the higher capital cost and the high running costs of the machines. In an area to which every shovelful of coal had to be brought by sea from the north-east coast the cost of the fuel to be used was a major consideration. Interestingly enough no one seems to have realised that in the vast deposits of fenland peat a fuel was available which, if not completely substitutable for coal could nevertheless have been used as a relatively cheap source of fuel, albeit with modified boilers. Nonetheless the fact remains that where artificial drainage by mechanical means was adopted, until the beginning of the nineteenth century this was always by windmill whilst an influential body of opinion favoured the direct drainage of fenland by gravitational methods and the consequent deepening of the Wash outfalls. The advocates of steam drainage appear, in the main, to have been the "improving agriculturalists" such as Arthur Young4 and their influence was presumably less great than they would have wished. Yet, although there was an undoubted antipathy to steam drainage this was not complete and there was some support for it even if only spasmodically in the later eighteenth century. One or two practical engineers also, particularly Rennie, were advocates at the time.
