How landowners, drainage projectors, and investors worked with the Crown to transform England’s waterlogged Fens. 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic DRAINING OF THE FENS The draining of the Fens in eastern England was one of the largest engineering projects in seventeenth-century Europe. A series of Dutch and English projectors, working over several decades and with the full support of the Crown, transformed hundreds of thousands of acres of putatively barren wetlands into dry, arable farmland.