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, a small rise of ground on the north-western edge of the Isle.
Sandtoft was not chosen by accident. It stood in a loop in the River Idle, close to the new drainage cuts, and the River Torne, giving Vermuyden’s team direct access to the works, while its slightly higher, drier ground made it a practical place to establish a permanent camp. The site could also be reached by water: using the Don’s northern branch, Turnbridge Dyke connected to the River Aire, and a sasse (a navigable sluice/ lock) was built into the Ashfield Bank near Thorne to provide access. A clause in the agreement with Charles I permitted Vermuyden to import materials from abroad free from customs duties, meaning that equipment and supplies could move along these waterways with relative ease.
A Dutch Enclave — and a Fortified One
By the mid-1630s, Sandtoft had grown into a substantial settlement of Dutch, Walloon, and French Protestant families. These settlers brought with them the skills needed to cut drains, build embankments, and farm reclaimed land; they also brought their own languages, customs, and religious traditions, and for a time, Sandtoft became a small but distinct continental enclave on the edge of the English moors.
To protect this vulnerable community in a landscape marked by tension and resentment, the settlement was enclosed and defended. Though not a fortress in the military sense, it was unmistakably a fortified camp: a planned, enclosed settlement with controlled access, defensive ditches, and a strong communal identity. At its heart stood a Protestant church, licensed for the settlers’ own worship, which served as the spiritual centre of the colony. Archaeological work is said to have uncovered foundations believed to be its remains, and a font associated with the church survives at Tetley Hall.
No buildings from the camp survive above ground, but accounts suggest a central cluster of houses and workshops built in the Dutch style, storehouses for tools and equipment, and paths and causeways connecting the settlement to the new drains spreading out across the drained ground.
The camp was fortified as tensions mounted throughout the 1630s and 1640s, and the foreign settlers at Sandtoft became a focus of resentment. Their distinct identity, foreign, Protestant, and closely associated with Vermuyden and the Crown, made them an obvious target. The fortification of the camp was therefore practical rather than military, protecting tools, crops, and livestock, security for families living far from established towns, and a buffer against attacks on the works themselves.