Flood Saturday

There are floods everywhere, courtesy of La Nina - the bad girl of world weather systems. On TV the tragedies of Brazil, Australia and Sri Lanka fill the screen. Here in Cumbria we too have once again been inundated by a huge storm coming in off the Atlantic. Weather warnings went out on Friday night and then became more particular on Saturday morning, with Appleby being the lead feed on Yahoo.co.uk news as well as on Sky and the BBC. Flood gates were closed to protect the town and the low-lying road alongside the river was also closed and sandbagged.

What it normally looks like

yesterday, beginning to flood

The mill is outside the town and can’t be protected. We just have to sit and watch the river creep towards the building and make sure that everything that might float away is tied down. The speed and menace of the water is horrifying; even knee deep you can feel it tugging at your legs to pull you down. I took photographs at around 4.30pm as it was getting dark, but high water didn’t happen until about 2am, so it was a long night. Fortunately, although we had 160mm of rain in only a few hours, the way it fell meant that we avoided catastrophic water levels.

The disappearing landscape

The biggest flood we’ve ever had, in 2005, had the river almost 20 feet (6.2 metres) above it’s normal height. Last night was probably only 2 and a half metres. So it penetrated into the lowest part of the ground floor and drowned the garden but didn’t threaten the structure. We had the windows securely boarded up to protect them from floating debris. This is obviously going to be the winter for extreme weather.

The Year of the Floods - Again

It seems unfair to be sitting in warm Italian sunshine, while my home county is under-water and the lead feature on the international news. It’s been an anxious time - we live in an old mill on the banks of a big river and it floods regularly. Before we left we stripped everything out of the ground floor, just in case the water rose high enough to come inside. And on Thursday it happened. A series of telephone calls as the river rose. Appleby on the news as residents filled sandbags and evacuated their belongings, expecting the Noah-style inundation we had in 2005 which almost reached the ceilings and made thousands of people homeless across Cumbria.

You can see from the picture the force of the water powering its way through windows and doors - the lintels of two windows are just visible. The wreckage left behind can be seen from outside in the photo taken next morning.

This time, it only flooded the ground floor of the mill (which is raised up about four feet above the river) to a depth of six inches, leaving a mess of mud and river debris. Appleby's riverside shops and houses were also flooded, though it escaped the worst of the weather. Other towns and villages weren’t so lucky and some of our friends are homeless again only five years since they were last flooded out. Neil has gone home, while I watch the internet news with disbelief at the scale of the flooding.

Living as we do with the rising and falling of the water, we’ve got used to compromising with it. I don’t grow anything in the garden that doesn’t survive being under-water. We don’t use the ground floor except in summer. We park our cars at the top of the hill as soon as it begins to rain. And, although it washes away my garden soil and floats off anything not tied down, it also brings gifts.
Last winter it left two beautiful

'accidental' sculptures on the weir. One a branch like a water sprite, trailing her arms in the water; the other a tree-stump like the head of a beast. They stayed there for a couple of months before the river rose again, carrying off the naeid, and moving the ‘beast’ up onto the river bank next to my garden.

There he’s remained all summer like a primitive carving - a god of the river - looking at me every time I glance out of the window. I suspect, after the water levels of the past few days the river will have moved him on, perhaps to dump him in someone else’s garden and I will be very, very sorry.