The Lincolnshire lowlands owe their existence to a long-term programme of formal and informal drainage, by which the landscape has been managed since the Roman period. The public bodies that have held responsibility for this drainage, namely the Commissions of Sewers followed by the Internal Drainage Boards (IDBs) from 1930, are often perceived as solely aiming to remove water from the land as quickly as possible. Recent water management planning in Lincolnshire has begun to explore the idea of water retention, but, as this article will show, this is not a new idea. Far from keeping water out at all costs, Lincolnshire's drained, farmed landscape is a porous one, which has benefited from a long history of deliberate, managed flooding and small-scale sacrifice of valuable agricultural land to water. This is a lacuna which exists in both the academic literature, and in the stories people involved in the drainage boards tell about themselves.

Using the framework of Tim Ingold's concept of 'taskscape', this article seeks to address the role of work in shaping the dynamics of rural community in the mid-twentieth century. We do this by examining oral histories of two communities which have important points of similarity and difference: the community farming on the small, mixed farms of Lower Wharfedale, on the border between North and West Yorkshire, and the workers and farmers cultivating the large-scale arable enterprises of the East Riding of Yorkshire Wolds. We argue that the form of agricultural work which took place in these localities during the mid-twentieth century was crucial in setting up the types of work relationships which characterized the different communities there. Localized differences manifested in several ways through the unique taskscapes of the two case studies: a deeply stratified community structure versus pseudo-familial employment relationships; proletarian village communities versus close farmer-employee relationships; and mobility versus stability.

In an area characterised by livestock farming, the auction mart had a pivotal role, both economically and culturally, and was crucial to the continued success of the community and the businesses of the area. Although made up from the surrounding farming community, the community of the auction mart was separate and different, if only on a temporary basis, with its own physical and social boundaries, cultural norms, and traditions, which had a significant effect on the personal identities of those who counted themselves as members. This article explores the auction mart community, its links to a wider farming network, and its influence on rural ideas about masculine identity, through an oral history study of the Lower Wharfedale area. This offers a window onto a community and a culture which has received very little academic attention due to its closed nature. The article concludes that the auction mart regulars constituted a community within the farming community, in which the theme of trust ran through every interaction, linking the everyday activity of the mart space to wider debates about the meaning of masculinity, transitions and ritual, social networks, and the nature of community.

The British farming community is rapidly diminishing due to its ageing workforce, the rise of second-home ownership, and the costs involved in running a farming business in the twenty-first century. The private nature of this community, often coupled with a deeply held mistrust of non-farmers has made it difficult to ascertain farmers' own feelings on their current situation, and how things have reached such a position. This article explores how some of the major twentieth-century events for agriculture have affected a single Yorkshire farming community by tracing the deteriorating relationship between farmers and the government, through changing legislation and reactions to crises, from a point where farmers were held to be vital to Britain's survival through to one where the agricultural community finds it plausible that their own government would actively try to destroy their livelihoods.