"His Excellency drew attention to the fact that the new road would cut out a portion of the best grazing land unless the cutting was bridged over. The Director recommended that the cutting be bridged over and the necessary fencing or wall at the top be built as part of the new road works.

"The Director stated that the actual archwork of the tunnel is now complete, but that the facades at each end and the concrete support piers have still to be done when the excavation has been taken down to road level."

Minutes of the Public Works Department, Summer 1931

When I was a boy in carefree days, we sometimes had the great treat of a hamburger (fulsome in mayonnaise) for lunch and cycled through Black Watch Pass to the Ducking Stool to eat and swim, playing hookie from the summer job. Across the road from the Park, itself a sad reflection of former days, stood the coveted Well of the Black Watch Regiment, then touted as a major stopping point on the tourist itinerary. Some years ago, perhaps due to an overweening health and safety decree, the Well was capped with a huge slab of faceless concrete, no more to be seen by visitor or resident alike. Since then, the pergola over the Well and the sign explaining its meaning have slowing been yielding to the rigours of sun, wind and rain, the former having a distinct lean to complete decay and the latter becoming an illegible varnished note of nobler times. So a smaller asset of heritage tourism declines along with some of the large ones, particularly of a military nature.

The Well there exists because of the nature of the geology in eastern Pembroke and western Devonshire. Undoubtedly exploited by the earlier settlers, the Royal Navy, with its seven wells further east of the Ducking Stool, brought to prominence the fact that large water lenses existed in the hills of that portion of those two parishes, when they dug and intercepted the fresh water percolated seaward through the inland limestones. Many a ship of the Royal Navy was thus supplied with drinking water via boats from a dock near the house named "Seven Wells". Later, the Black Watch dug their eponymous drinking hole "for the sake of the poor and their cattle in the long drought of 1849".

Nearby is the great Black Watch Pass which was not dug by the soldiers (otherwise the 42nd Regiment of Foot, motto: "No One Provokes Me With Impunity"), but by the civilian government of the island in the early 1930s. The Pass was excavated as part of a major scheme of the 1920s and early 1930s, approved by the House of Assembly as "The March Reclamation Act, 1925", later apparently dubbed "The Marsh Folly" for a number of reasons. A major point, though not perhaps acknowledged until these more environmentally sensitive times, was the folly of destroying the largest wetlands in Bermuda, in effect, a major environmental disaster, exemplified now by the eminence of the "Marsh Volcano", which from time to time erupts to the discomfort of the major neighourhood to the east, to say nothing of smoking out some of the "best grazing lands" to the north. Governments all over the world, until recently, have often regarded wetlands as expendable, to be destroyed by filling up with rubble and trash.

Such was the case with the Pembroke Marsh, and indeed had been the case from the earliest days of Bermuda, from whence arose the old local saying, "take de trash to de pond". In the mid-1920s, however, the grand scheme was to "improve" the Pembroke Marsh by turning most of it into solid ground, creating the foundations for a racetrack for horses and other sporting facilities. The project appears to have become the greatest of white elephants in the history of sporting venues on the island, with only the Tennis Stadium being erected by the side of the tracks of the Bermuda Railway Company, to be surfaced in "red en-tout-cas", no less.

The project was described in the October 1931 issue of "The Bermudian" magazine by one of its paid protagonists, Mr. William Livingston, Director of Public Works, and erstwhile author of a little booklet on geology of our home, "A Million Years on Mount Bermuda". Under its full title of the "Pembroke Marsh Recreation Area Scheme", "recently adopted by the House of Assembly", a preliminary survey was made in 1926, and a purpose-built Cutter Suction Dredger, General Asser, arrived in Bermuda from Glasgow on August 4, 1927, armed to its great teeth to chew into the prehistoric wetlands.

Had the General achieved its march eastward from Mill Creek, we would have today a major canal as "a navigable waterway for Motor Launches" and "along this Canal would be a bridle-path for equestrian recreation". Massive infilling began and in 1930 alone, some 253,000 cubic yards of material was dumped into the Pembroke Marshes, some of which came from the cutting of Black Watch Pass, being excavated for the new road on level ground from Hamilton to the North Shore. Where water once lapped at the north end of Court Street, probably full of ducks and other waterfowl, massive dumping filled the wetlands with the "reclaimed" land now occupied by the Transport Control Board buildings.

What must have been once of the prettiest of Bermuda scenes was slowly submerged in muck pumped in from Mill Creek or rubble deposited from some of the few trucks on the island of the day. All that is left of the great recreational scheme are the Tennis Courts and a few playing fields, one on the premises of Saltus Grammar School. In recent years, some real reclamation has taken place as the Government has tried to bring back some of the wetlands. The "Grand Canal" from the Pembroke Marshes to the sea at Mill Creek is but a small, fetid canalized stream, wending its polluted way past the hideous industrial smorgasbord of western Pembroke.

A tsunami or rising sea level might help the stream and the wetlands to reclaim the Pembroke Marshes, but unfortunately in such an event, the lights would go out for any humans still left in the equation, as the Island's electricity generating plant would be one of the first victims of that reclamation by Mother Nature.

Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments may be made to drharris@logic.bm or 704-5480.