The South Forty Foot Drain

I had to cross the Forty Foot on the way to deliver some clocks and stopped to see if there was anything of interest.  There were just the swan and the cows. The South Forty Foot Drain, also known by the hardly less prosaic title of the Black Sluice Navigation, is the main channel for the land-drainage of the Black Sluice Level in the Lincolnshire Fens.  It lies  between Guthram Gowt and the Black Sluice pumping station on The Haven at Boston. The Drain has its origins in the 1630s, when the first scheme to make the Fen land available for agriculture was carried out and has been steadily improved since then. Water drained from the land entered The Haven by gravity at certain states of the tide until 1946, when the Black Sluice pumping station was commissioned.