May 15, 2026

A Church for the Strangers: The Chapel at Sandtoft

A Congregation of Refugees The settlers who gathered at Sandtoft were not a single homogeneous group. The first wave, arriving around 1628, comprised some eighty families from Walloon Flanders — Dutch and French-speaking Protestants who had fled the religious persecution of the Spanish Netherlands. They were followed in 1635 by a further substantial influx, mostly artisans and tenant farmers from...
Categories Uncategorized Comments: 0
May 9, 2026

Cornelius Vermuyden’s Fortified Camp at Sandtoft

When Cornelius Vermuyden arrived in the Isle of Axholme in the 1620s, he brought with him workers from across the North Sea. The transformation of Hatfield Chase and the surrounding marshlands required skilled labourers, surveyors, craftsmen, and administrators, many of them Dutch, many of them strangers to the landscape they were about to reshape. Their base of operations became Sandtoft,...
Categories Vermuyden's Drainage Scheme Comments: 2
April 23, 2026

Vermuyden’ Subsidiary Works – The Dutch River

Flooding at Fishlake & Sykehouse — The Price of Imperfection Even as these new works were rising, serious problems were emerging elsewhere in the drainage system. The diversion of the River Don northward into the Aire had unintended consequences for the settlements along its banks, and the villages of Fishlake and Sykehouse suffered severe flooding as a direct result of Vermuyden’s works...
Categories Cornelius Vermuyden/Vermuyden's Drainage Scheme Comments: 0
February 26, 2026

Vermuyden’s’General Rule of Drayning‘

Cornelius Vermuyden’s “General Rule of Draining,” is detailed in his 1642 work A Discourse Touching the Drayning of the Great Fennes, was a foundational approach to large-scale land reclamation in 17th-century England.  Although this paper was written after Vermuyden had left Hatfield Chase and the Isle of Axholme and was focused on the Great Level in Cambridgeshire, it shows Vermuyden’s approach...
Categories Cornelius Vermuyden Comments: 0