The Brickwater Marhses or Brick Water Marshes was an area of marshy terrain South of London that formed when the Thames River broke it's banks and effectively moved position into this area. It is possible the Brickwater Marshes lead directly into the marshes where the East of the English Channel used to be.
Terrain[]
A modern day coastal marsh; the Brickwater Marshes would probably look like this.
Like all marshes, the Brickwater Marshes is wet, soggy, grassy terrain where no large trees grow. Most of the ground is soft and surrounded by large amounts of water. When plains flood (and this is how the Brickwater Marshes formed) they often turn into marshland.
The Brickwater Marshes are notably different because they now cover what used to be urban landscape, farmland and plains South of pre-war London, when the Thames River broke it's banks during a storm in the early Black Centuries.
This means that, underneath the mud and grasses, that the remains of skyscrapers could remain. Notable examples of pre-war infastructure lying underneath the marsh was an airport, possibly Gatwick Airport (which lies South of London).
Therefore, the Brickwater Marshes was a hotbed of archaelogical activity with treasure seekers and scientists alike from all over Europe coming to dig in the unforgiving ground.
Formation[]
When the North Sea dried up and most of the English Channel along with it, it initially became marsh lands instead of salt plains and (in the far North) oak forests.
During this time the Thames could not drain fast enough and so flooded, bursting it's banks. The remainder created the Brickwater Marshes, taking most of Southern London with it in the early Black Centuries. This extra marsh gave the Thames sufficient drainage area, and so the river returned to roughly it's pre-war size.
Notable Locations[]
- The Great North Road, a road for Land Ships to travel along most of Europe made of compacted chalk, terminated in London and a causway had to be constructed across the Brickwater Marshes.
- Scriven elite, in their hayday, would build isolated 'summer mansions' on the marsh, protected from the human riff-raff of the city by the terrain around them. The last survivors of the Scriven Uprisings fortified themselves in one such house, and it proved to be a fairly effective fort.
- Dozens of archaelogical camps are scattered across the marshes and a few may have started to form into permanent towns, as hinted at in Fever Crumb.