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- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
What is it like to experience a flood? The answers that Michael Brown comes up with are surprising. His house was underwater for several weeks during the inundation of the Somerset Levels. He decided to stay on through it, and he was amazed at the ensuing chain of events as he, along with his local community, first fought the water, pumping and sweeping and panicking – then came acceptance of the inevitable defeat, and finally there came an unexpected wealth of emotions as the waters – and the locals – had to settle into a strange and ultimately rewarding state of marooned calm. This well-written series of highlights of Michael's diary are very real: the account is funny, observant, honest and unpredictable.
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Seitenzahl: 393
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Surviving the Deluge
MICHAEL BROWN
To all our grandchildren
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost we’d like to give huge and lasting thanks to our family for all their support through the flood days: especially to my brother, Alastair, and his wife, Kathy, for looking after Poppy for nearly three months; to my sister, Diana, and to Emily and Oliver who were in contact daily to see how we were faring, as well as to all the cousins and friends in distant places who made frequent contact to boost our spirits.
In works of non-fiction it is common for authors to thank those who have helped in their research or lent special insights into the writing of their book. Whilst warmly thanked for their contribution they often do not actually appear within its pages. In theatrical terms, they remain behind the scenes.
This book is different. As the events of the flood are based on the diary I kept during that time, many of those who gave such kindness and support to Utta and myself throughout those watery days actually figure as part of the narrative – ‘Tonight went to supper with..’ Furthermore it was these encounters, perhaps sitting round a table having a meal or a cuppa with them that often led to conversations and stories of their lives or the lives of others which also form part of this book.
And so it is with extra special gratitude that we would like to thank all those who helped us in so many different ways during the flood, either taking in our washing or inviting us round for meals or lending us essential items we’d lost or giving us food to take home, or helping restore order, or simply popping by to share a coffee and a chat. And for telling their stories. For all or some of these things and much more, we are hugely grateful to Roddy and Holly Baillie-Grohman, Rita and Chris Dobson, Nick and Sheila Frost, Sue and Glen Ward, Harry and Chris Osmond, Simon and Jayne Taylor, Rose Burton, Evie Body, John and Becky Coutts, Niall Christie, Tony Roberts, Michael and Judith Drewell, Liz and Peter Nightingale, David and Ingrid White, Biddy and Paul Belding, Sam and Lucy Hay, John and Margaret Spurr, Tony and Susan Ogilvy, Jane Lang, Nigel Hunt, Nigel and Kate Bunce, Carolyn Roche, Miriam Arscott, Julian and Diana Temperley.
I’d also like to thank all those who gave me their time – and their coffee – to talk about their involvement in the flooding and their memories past and present. They include Richard and Anne England, Alastair and Mary Mullineux, Rob Walrond, James Winslade, Simon Taylor, Mike and Jenny Curtis, Chris Osborne, Nick Frost, Carolyn Roche, Julian and Mary Taylor, Sally England, Graham and Helen Walker, John and Lizzie Leach, Dion Warner, Sally Dunbar, and Michele and Terry Bradley. I am also indebted to two excellent books in particular for the background and history of the Levels: ‘Avalon and Sedgemoor’ by Desmond Hawkins and ‘The Draining of the Somerset Levels’ by Michael Williams as well as to Geoffrey Body and Roy Gallop’s booklet on the ‘Parrett River Trade.’
I’d like to thank James Crowden not only for his supply of pies but for bringing Martin Hesp to witness and write about the Thorney flood and for introducing us, with Pauline Rook, to Dan Alsop, chartered engineer, who saw the potential of the Raised Bank to protect the village. I’d like to give special thanks to Ed Colegrave and his team for renovating and repairing the house after the flood with such spirit and understanding – not often said of builders! I’d also like to thank our neighbour, Nick Frost, as well as all the movers and shakers in Somerset County Council directly involved, for ensuring the Thorney Raised Bank was built and the splendid team from Bernard Perry Ltd who carried out the work.
Chapter 1
IN THE BEGINNING
‘What about flooding’, we asked nervously when we looked at the crumbling house as prospective buyers all those years ago.
‘No, it never floods now,’ they said, ‘Not after all the work they did back in the 1950s and 1960s raising the bank,’ and they were right. Mind you, we’d probably have bought the place anyway, it was love at first sight for Utta.
That was back in 1982. Now we are sitting on that same riverbank with a cup of tea. It is spring, 2012, on the river Parrett at Thorney on the edge of the Somerset Levels.
This is reward time after an afternoon of heavy gardening. The grassy bank is dry now. After weeks of cold wind the weather has changed, the earth in the veg garden beginning to warm to the fingers; this has led to a fever of planting. As we sip our tea we watch the comings and goings of a pair of kingfishers on the bank opposite. They’re busy either making a nest in the bank behind them or using their perch of tangled sticks as a fishing platform. There’s been much activity up and down the river these last few days. Like jewels they flash past, skimming low over the water down the middle of the river following the sweep of the bend. Elsewhere below us there’s a plop, a ruffle of water as the fish are starting to feed. Big chub gather on this stretch; at the moment the water is too dark to see into but in summer they stack like torpedoes in the shallows under the far bank. And spring has sprung: we’ve just seen the first swallow.
Though teeming with wildlife there is nothing spectacular about this river which winds idly past between its high banks. You could easily pass it by, just another unremarkable stretch of the river Parrett. In the big field opposite along the far hedge a heron stalks the long grass like an old man looking for his glasses. Peering intently. Frogs, mice, insects, we never know, but he’s often there. Beyond the hedge is the old railway line that linked Yeovil to Langport running past the old milk depot, ugly red brick buildings to our left. From here the milk churns were loaded onto the stopping trains and straight up to London to the Nestlé factory – always known locally as ‘nestles’, they didn’t bother with that new-fangled accent on the last ‘e’. Later the buildings were taken over by the Milk Marketing Board serving the many small dairy farmers round here. As if in memory a rusty old churn we found by the railway line now forms the centrepiece of our veg patch. The depot buildings are used today by small businesses, a forge, carpenter, stone mason. Noises of banging, metal bashing punctuate the peace each day.
Not the scene on the manicured banks of the river Avon or the Test, no, just a very ordinary corner of the Somerset Levels. But we love it, love this spot, our house and our garden sheltered by hedge and trees and the big house across the road. We called it Willow Cottage when we bought it as a ruin thirty years ago but it appears on old maps of the early 1900s as the Withy Factory and belonged to local agricultural merchants, processing the withies – willows – grown on the moor behind us for the basket-making trade. From our seat on the bank, the house stands behind and below us, settled into the curve of the river in such a way that it seems almost to grow out of the ground it stands on. The larger part, perhaps once the manager’s house, is built of the local blue lias stone, weathered now, while the oldest, smaller part is of rose-coloured brick, thin and irregular, like home-baked biscuits, hauled up over two centuries ago by barge from the thriving brickworks at Bridgwater on the mouth of the Parrett. The barge might well have carried coal and other products and returned with a load of withies or flour from the mill upstream. Processing withies was evidently thirsty work and required a sizeable workforce for when we first discovered the house in its ruined state there were urinals everywhere, inside and out, though this might also have had something to do with the presence of the pub next door, ‘The Old Rising Sun’.
Behind us, over the road, is West Moor, one of a patchwork of moors, tracts of low-lying land, each with their own individual character with names like King’s Moor, Currymoor, Saltmoor, Allermoor, which together form the Somerset Levels. Some are as big as prairies but ‘our’ West Moor, around 800 acres, is one of the smallest, and most contained; in the eyes of all those who live around its edge it’s by far the most beautiful, bounded by the river Parrett and the river Isle and the villages and hamlets of Kingsbury, Lower and Higher Burrow and Hambridge to the south. Like all the moors on the Levels it is criss-crossed by a maze of rhynes – water ditches – enclosing the fields. On average one square mile contains as many as twenty miles of rhyne. Low-lying, much of it is at sea level or just above.
One of the things that attracted us to Willow Cottage when we first stumbled across it back in the early 1980s was the fact that you could simply cross the road and walk for miles on droves, green lanes, that take you deep into the moor alongside rhynes fringed with reeds busy in summer with the flicker and sound of warblers that you can only ever glimpse. Like all the moors it has a tranquillity, a deep peace and intimacy that holds you, causes you to stop and stare, to dream. It teems with wildlife: otters leave trails of fresh water mussels; warblers; skylarks in spring; snipe and lapwing reside in winter. Swans make huge nests in the same place each year. There are redshank, cranes, egret, water voles, butterflies; dragonfly as big as choppers take off and land on lily pads in summer. And always a heron like a sentinel peering into the rhyne or river. The moor is a great rich soup supporting growth of all forms of life, willow, grass, cattle and wildlife.
Not so long ago our local West Moor was covered in withies, the basket-making variety of willow, the wands planted seventy thousand to the acre. Many families around the edge of the moor had a withy bed or two down on the moor. It was probably the largest industry in the area employing hundreds of people and entire families. Houses would often have their own withy boilers where the bundles of wands were boiled to soften the bark for stripping. Some still exist on the road to Kingsbury, the next village; with their brick chimneys and chambers they’re like old-fashioned steam engines stripped of their wheels. Children would do an hour’s work, stripping the bark by hand before and after school.
When we first came here many of the withy beds were still worked. I remember one evening following a grassy lane between tall sedges that swayed and rustled in the gloom, beyond them an impenetrable mass of withies. It was like entering some strange jungle, so unexpected, a totally different world. The withies were harvested over winter, cut, often boated up to the edge of the village in the floodwater for processing at farms and houses along the moor, many of them at our house, the Withy Factory, here in Thorney. Now, the market gone, just two withy beds remain. West Moor has changed, more sparse. But still magical.
In time of flood it acts as a massive sump to park the floodwater from the rivers and surrounding hills, storing it sometimes for months at a time before it can be pumped back into the river Parrett.
Most years there is flooding of some sort and the moor fills for a week or two; there is something ancient, elemental about this inland winter sea on our door step that brings great flocks of wildfowl, widgeon, teal, geese and swan. We have seen some huge floods, roughly one a decade, that have threatened inundation but mostly it’s been a case of the odd road impassable, soggy gardens and the inconvenience of having to go the long way round to get to where you want. Seasonal flooding of the moor has become part of our life as it was for those who lived on and around the Levels down the centuries.
And so for three decades we have stayed dry. As they said we would.
*****
Neither of us are locals. Utta is Australian, her family having emigrated there from Germany when she was seven, while I spent my early childhood in north Cornwall before my parents moved to the edge of Dartmoor in Devon. Those were the only moors I knew, high moors, where we spent most of our summers roaming and swimming in freezing moorland streams. Travelling home to Devon down the A30 or A303 from school or university or from work in London I always found Somerset featureless and uninspiring; glimpses of elms, dull fields, flat landscape, my mind always focussed on getting home to Devon and Dartmoor.
And then in the spring of 1973 quite by chance I discovered the Somerset Levels.
I was asked by a friend if I’d like to help catch elvers – baby eels – which he was shipping to eel farms in the Far East for growing on. I’d left a job in industry and was at the time trying to earn my living as a free-lance travel writer. With limited success. I’d spend hours staring at blank pieces of paper or crossing out the few lines I’d written. The invitation to Somerset was a delicious diversion. The first night of my visit I was dropped with a net and some brief instructions on how to catch them on the bank of the river Parrett about two miles below Langport opposite a small pub, the Black Smock, whose lights shone softly over the river. To my surprise I caught a few kilos, tiny wriggling creatures, translucent, unmistakable baby eels that made a faint whispering in the back of the net when I lifted it to inspect my catch.
It was all exciting, all new. I’d never stood on a river bank at night, I’d never fished for elvers, I’d never seen the Somerset Levels, nor even heard of them before. It was a mild soft spring night and gradually as I fished I began to tune in to the sounds, the mew of peewits, cough of cattle in the field opposite, a church clock striking somewhere and an owl on the hill behind. I was hooked.
When you grow up in a place as a child you may love it, feel happy there, but you’ve had no part in choosing that place. Then comes a time when you meet a new and different landscape, one that totally grabs you, one that you make your own. This was Somerset for me. As the days went by, in gaps between fishing tides, I became enchanted by the wide open skies, the quiet lanes lined with willows, and always the glint of water from rhyne or river. And out there on the moor, that deep settled peace.
Yet it wasn’t only Somerset that drew me, so different to anything I’d seen before, it was the prospect of finding a new direction, a new way of life. I’d found it hugely satisfying helping with the elvers, making nets and all the hands-on practical stuff as well as finding markets for them. The following year when I returned to help again, things had moved on, the Far East market for elvers had evaporated and my friend had been offered a place at a business school. He suggested I might like to take on the elver business. I leapt at the idea. Being my own boss, running a small business, and in the country. It solved the problem of how and where to earn a living. There was nothing to buy, just the lease to renegotiate with the farmer.
By the start of the elver season of spring 1975 I’d found a cottage at a peppercorn rent on the Blackdown Hills within easy reach of the elver-holding site and the river. Much more important I’d found someone to share this new rural life. That Christmas I’d sent a card to a striking and unusual Aussie lady I’d met in London; she’d been over in Europe for a year or two having a break from nursing but was now back in Sydney. I told her about the elvers and the cottage and for fun described the little bath, the smallest I’d ever seen that sat in the windy lean-to tacked on to the side of the cottage. Posting the card I’d thought no more of it. Then one day, some three weeks later, a man on a motorcycle delivered a telegram – as they did in those days (far more romantic than a text or an email). It read quite simply, ‘Coming to share your bath’.
And she did.
That first elver season of 1975 we had beginners’ luck: a plentiful supply of elvers, good fishermen – we caught most of them ourselves – and a good market for them for restocking in Germany. We made a small profit. It was exhilarating. We were married in the September. The following year our beginner’s luck ran out. The elver season was very thin and we just survived. Utta went back to nursing and I found some part-time teaching but we carried on the elvering and good years were to follow. We’d learned a lesson though: man could not live by elvers alone. They were too unreliable. There needed to be something more secure. Gradually and more by drift and happenstance than by bold decision, we began to develop a smokery, producing smoked eel and in time all sorts of other smoked food. We sold by mail order, then through our on-site shop and finally opened a restaurant in the building next door.
In the long hot summer of 1976 we’d moved from the Blackdown Hills to a rented house in Drayton, home for six years, but we were always looking for a place of our own. The trouble was we had no identifiable income with which to reassure the mortgage companies; we were self-employed with an erratic business, they’d take one look at our accounts and politely show us the door. Then Utta found Willow Cottage. She was on her way back from work and saw the derelict building with a For Sale sign. It had a demolition order on it, geese lived in one end, floors and ceilings were collapsing. But it was south facing, it flooded with sunlight – very important for an Aussie – and she could see the potential. I was not ecstatic. All I could see were the costs of renovation. But there had been two significant changes, the banks had entered the mortgage market and were touting for customers, and the council was handing out house improvement grants.
We bought it. The builder knocked most of it down and rebuilt it in accordance with modern regulations which gave us higher ceilings and yet more light. Thoughtfully too, as he’d had experience of flooded properties, he raised the old floor level by about six inches.
We moved into our new house in early summer of 1983. And for the rest of our working lives, through all the years of elvering, Utta’s nursing, the growing up of our children, developing the smokery through to retirement and the arrival of grandchildren, all through a full and busy life, Willow Cottage was our home, our harbour. A place we loved. Root down deep.
And in all that time it never flooded.
*****
When you arrive in a new place you often learn about it by degrees like getting to know a person. When first coming to Somerset I was totally unaware of the history of flooding on the Levels. Probably it was through chatting to Ernie Woods, the shepherd, at the farm where we had the elver storage tanks that I had my first insight into what the flooding had been like in the old days. As I worked in the barn making nets or trays each season, he liked to come in and chat after he’d done his rounds of the sheep – he was a great talker. But he was fascinating, a rich seam of oral history. Ernie had lived down on the moor in a cottage on the river, a two-up-two down, about two miles below Langport. I remember him describing some of the big floods he’d seen as a boy in the 1930s.
‘We’d take what we could carry upstairs and I kin remember one time it were so deep, we ad to get in and out the house through the bedroom window. We had an old boat and ’ad her tied up to the winda sill. Then when the water was gone out the house we just gave it a good brushing out to get rid of that there mud and stuff and then we got on wi’ it. There waddn no insurance or nothun in them days. No, you just got on wi en.’
Another person with memories of the flooding is Dion Warner, a retired engineer, a great naturalist and now regular volunteer for the RSPB and Natural England. As a child he was evacuated from London during the war and joined his grandparents who lived on the river Parrett at Stathe, up-river from the confluence of the Tone and the Parrett. His grandfather was a ditcher, working for the Drainage Board, paid by the chain, 22 yards of ditch cleared.
‘There was always flooding every winter. You just got used it, a bit of water came in the house, no one minded too much, you just brushed it out. But they really worked the sluices then. That was the way you managed the river: you waited till low tide and then you wound up the hatches on the sluice gates and let the flood water out of the moor. So every stretch of the river had its sluice and person responsible for operating it.’ He has other memories too, of his grandfather catching eels. ‘He used to set night lines, baited with chicken gizzards. I can remember him coming home with an eel over the handle bars of the bike trailing over the road. Big ones like that, they’d bake, stuffed with parsley sauce.’ Back then you lived on the moor and you lived off the moor.
Whenever Dion was taken by his grandfather – it was always a Sunday – to have his hair cut by Harold Mead, a withy grower and cider maker in Athelney, grandpa would sit outside in the garden shed sampling the cider. Dion meanwhile was given his short back and sides in a room where one wall was scored with the heights and dates recording all the floods that had entered the house over the years. And there were many.
Flooding wasn’t all bad though and it could bring unexpected benefits. One particularly bad winter probably in the late 1920s a couple were living upstairs in their flooded house. From the landing, the story goes, the husband spotted a large fish swimming around below them in the parlour,
‘I said to the missus, we’re going to ave ’ee. So I went and got me gun and I shot the bugger. Eee were a gurt big carp and we ’et en. Twas lovely.’ It was quite possibly in the same flood that a farmer milked his cows on a bridge, the only dry spot on his land, while his wife continued to churn butter on the roof of one of their outbuildings.
Hearing these stories and reminiscences, one is struck by the resilience, the toughness of people ‘back in them days,’ how long-suffering they were. It may have helped that their working lives were hard with few material possessions beyond the basics, with stone flag floors rather than carpets – the more you have, the more you fret – yet one senses, beside the sense of community, a greater self-reliance, more communal responsibility in coping with the flood. Living on the moor men knew the river far more intimately than we do now; they worked on it and on its rhynes; they knew how and where you might control the flood, to wind sluices, and they were permitted, indeed expected, to do so. It was much more hands-on then. There is no way that we would know how to start the pumps at our nearby pumping station – even if we could get into the building. It’d be a criminal offence, rightly so. Over time management of the river and flooding has been centralised, with fewer and fewer boots on the ground and with that, something has been lost; such a remotely managed system can lead to suspicion, anger, to frustrated cries of ‘Why aren’t they doing anything?’, ‘Why aren’t they pumping?’ Good management is also about good communication.
*****
Gradually I came to realise that you had only to dip into any history of the Somerset Levels or talk to older members of the community and it was always there: the threat of flooding from the river or the sea. As relevant today as it was a thousand years ago.
And if you glance at the map of the county, you can see why: the Somerset Levels are a flood waiting to happen. For a start, bounded on all sides by hills, like shuttering, the Mendips in the east, the Quantocks to the west, the Blackdowns and the Ham hills to the south, the whole upland area that drains onto the Levels is some four times greater an area than the Levels themselves: four into one doesn’t go. Added to this, the plain of the Levels is actually saucer-shaped, turning up along the coastal ridge, marginally higher than the moors inland, preventing the rapid escape of waters.
When rain falls on the hills it feeds rapidly – increasingly so with urban expansion upstream – in to these rivers which are amongst some of the slowest-moving in the country. The Parrett has a fall of about one foot for every mile on its way down to Bridgwater. Like an old dairy cow, it moves slowly, not to be rushed, taking its time to make it to the parlour, always with an eye for the chance of a wander where it shouldn’t. So instead of rushing their cargo of water to discharge into the sea like any other well-behaved river, there’s something truculent, bloody-minded about these rivers of the Levels. Despite centuries of efforts at banking them up, fastening them in, they have a tendency to unbutton, go walk about, outwards, sideways – in often devastating fashion.
And if all that wasn’t enough – this saucer-shaped plain, bounded by hills, drained by the lazy rivers – there is the tidal lock: even if they wanted to discharge into the sea, the second largest tidal system in the world roars up the Bristol Channel and blocks the Parrett at periods of high tide – six days out of every fortnight – for about three hours twice a day. Like having a huge barrier set in place at the river outlet. No wonder then that down the centuries to the present day it has been a constant struggle to keep the sea out and the river in.
*****
Thousands of years ago it must have been an extraordinary landscape, this wilderness of swamp and marsh, an inland sea swaying and swishing with great beds of reed stretching as far as the eye could see, dotted with small islands covered in thickets of alder and willow; the air full of the cries of birds, the waters teeming with fish. A good place for its early dwellers settled around the edges or on some of the larger islands, moving by boat, canoe, or on a network of wooden trackways, like the Sweet Track, constructed around 3800BC, laid across the marsh like spines.
From Neolithic times man had realised the value of those parts of the marshy wastes that weren’t permanently submerged, as grazing lands for fattening their cattle. Somerset was originally known as ‘Sumersata’, the land of the summer people who came down from the hills to graze their animals. Flood silt like the Nile in ancient Egypt enriched the land and the grass grew.
For the hunter gatherer, for communities living off the Levels, there was no need to change the landscape, it provided all they needed. The Levels could stay as they were. But for farmers, early graziers, it was different: they realised that where land was not submerged all year round, when it became uncovered in summer and on the islands, the grass grew on soil enriched by silt and nutrients and gave good pasture for their animals. Proper agriculture required better drainage to increase the acreage available and to improve the conditions for people to live on and around the moors.
It’s easy to think it might have been the Romans who began to sort out the drainage and flooding of the Levels. They were such incredible engineers and after all, if they could build Hadrian’s Wall 120 miles long in just six years across the north of the country to keep the barbarians out, they could surely manage a few miles of sea wall along with some draining of the marshes. But it seems they were never much interested in the Levels. It wasn’t strategically or economically important enough for them. Yes, they mined silver and lead on the Mendips, and they were indeed involved in some major engineering, building sea defences; they also found the best places ways to ford the Parrett – at Combwich on the estuary and up-river inland at Langport – but they liked to be able to move fast, none of this sloshing about in a swamp if you could avoid it. So they seemed happier on higher ground, flood-free, building their settlements, like Ilchester, more in south Somerset nearer to their military road, the Fosse Way that sliced across the country linking Exeter to Lincoln, a distance of 182 miles and never more than six miles from a straight line.
In the early Middle Ages the Anglo-Saxons with their settlements and intensification of farming on and around the islands of the Levels – recognisable today through the suffix of oy, ney, and y as in Muchelney, Middlzoy and Othery – would almost certainly have made some attempts at improving the land. At this time, however, the wetlands of Somerset were used in other ways. In time of war they were a perfect hiding place; no enemy would dare follow you into this labyrinth of reed and marsh. In 871 when the whole region was invaded by the Danes, Alfred, Anglo-Saxon King of Wessex, took refuge from their forces, retreating into this watery jungle to his base on the island of Athelney, the perfect hide-out from which to re-group.
Legend has it that during this interlude, in hiding on the island of Athelney, he was asked to keep an eye on bread or cakes baking in the oven of his host’s house. One can imagine the scene: Alfred and his commanders, heads bent over a map at a rough table, absorbed in planning their next move. One of them, suddenly, ‘My Lord, what’s that smell, something burning?’
Alfred, raising his head, sniffing, puzzled, then suddenly, ‘Oh bugger it, (or the Saxon equivalent) the cakes, quick, I forgot the cakes…’
We can all sympathise with the poor man, he wasn’t the first and he certainly won’t be the last. He was obviously better at fighting than he was at cooking for in May 878 he emerged from the marshes, surprising the Danes and defeating them in battle. Under the terms of surrender Guthrun, their leader, agreed to convert to Christianity. As a result the Danish King and his chiefs were baptised at Aller, across the moor from Athelney.
*****
Managing the seasonal flooding of the Levels that occurred down the centuries needed constant attention, commitment and funds. It also required continuity of purpose and the constant need for maintenance. That is as true now as it was in the Middle Ages. From the end of the first millennium to the present day, the draining of the Levels has been characterised by periods of sustained progress followed by long fallow periods of muddle and inactivity.
It was the church that had perhaps the greatest effect on the landscape of the Levels. The Benedictine monasteries of Glastonbury, Muchelney and Athelney, together with the great See of Bath and Wells, all with their ecclesiastical estates, were major landowners and provided the commitment and funds in reclaiming and draining the Levels. Their main achievements took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries but nevertheless for several hundred years until their dissolution in the 1530s they were the consistent administration. They had the wealth, energy and purpose to mobilise the workforce needed to embank rivers, dig rhynes and ditches, build miles of retaining walls – even to alter the course of rivers. All serious undertakings. Indeed it was in their own interests. Through ingenious cuttings and use of rivers, Glastonbury and Wells both had direct access to the sea and trade, while draining the Levels not only improved the land but created more acreage for grazing. Upgrading mere pasture to meadows meant that hay crops could be grown for over-wintering animals, improving the settlements and yielding better rentals from tenants: in 1234, for example, the accounts of Glastonbury abbey record 722 acres of reclaimed land near Weston Zoyland, increased to 972 acres by 1240 and all producing more revenue for the coffers.
However the momentum of these achievements was lost by the ravages of the Black Death in 1348 when nearly half the population was wiped out, further by the strife and chaos of the Wars of the Roses and finally by the dissolution of the monasteries themselves in the 1530s. Throughout this time, of course, the problems remained: seasonal flooding could still turn the whole area into a watery waste. Yet without the sustained commitment of the church, the progress that had been made gradually unravelled; land ownership fragmented and on such a disparate group of tenants and landowners it became increasingly difficult to raise taxes to fund works needed.
For the ensuing centuries, indeed right up until the Second World War, progress on the draining and improvement of the Levels remained sporadic: years of intense activity followed by barren years of muddle and decline. Great opportunities were lost. In 1655 the great Dutch engineer, Cornelius Vermuyden, who had famously drained the Fens, purchased 4000 acres of ‘boggy and unwholesome’ land on the Kings Sedgemoor that he aimed to improve by drainage; if successful he would almost certainly have been asked to drain the rest of the moor. However the scheme was rejected by the commoners, tenants and freeholders who refused to give their consent fearing for the loss of their grazing rights and their livelihood.
Again it is hardly surprising that after the Civil War, followed by Monmouth’s Rebellion and its savage reprisals, matters of drainage and reclamation were far from the minds of men. As a result, two thirds of the Levels were still unreclaimed nearly a century later. It wasn’t until around the 1770s, however, that things began to change. Growth in agriculture brought renewed activity in the draining of the Levels: expanding markets, a growing population, importance of food supply during the Napoleonic Wars and a rise in land values (an acre of land valued at £20 could be worth up to a £100 if drained), provided all the right economic conditions to reawaken a sense of purpose. The Enclosure Acts enabled land on the moor to be enclosed often by the creation of rhynes, water boundaries, along with channels and ditches which also helped improve drainage. Steam pumps began to be used for the first time not just to prevent flooding but also to extend the period of the grazing season further into the spring and autumn. Pumping stations were built up and down the river and at crucial points on the moor. Many are still in use today – though electric has replaced first steam then diesel power. Their tall brick chimneys still mark the landscape up and down the river.
The Westonzoyland Pumping Station is a good example. It was built following the 1830 Act of Parliament to drain and improve the moors around Othery, Middlezoy and Westonzoyland. It drained 2000 acres of surrounding land. The first pump, not powerful enough, was replaced by a unique Land Drainage pump, made in 1861 by Easton Amos, a masterpiece of Victorian engineering, capable of pumping a 100 tonnes a minute, a match for most modern equipment. The pumping station is now a museum – open every Sunday – and offers a fascinating insight into a way of life that lasted pretty well from the mid-1830s through to the 1950s. A remote spot, the station keeper lived on site with his wife and family in the little cottage provided by the Water Board built next to the pump. Far from help in time of flood, they had to be entirely self-sufficient. They had their own vegetable garden, their own forge to make any running repairs to the pump or steam engine – and of course their own outside lavatory – that leans at an alarming angle. Very probably they used the fire box in the boiler stove for their baking and roasting, as do the volunteers who run the place now.
Back in the early days of elvering in the 1970s I remember these pumps being turned on as the river swelled on the high tide each spring. They were diesel-driven then but made a wonderful clonk-clonk-clonk sound in the gathering dusk. It let you know that somewhere out there a sweet flow of fresh water from the moor was being pumped into the river to lure the elvers into the side. It drew them like a drug. In festive atmosphere family and friends of the pump keeper would gather for the occasion as they would have done down the years long before elvering became commercial. Elvers were prized seasonal food, a little luxury after a long winter, and the ducks loved them too. One night I remember fishing opposite one of these pumps just below Burrowbridge. On my side of the river I was catching almost nothing while I watched, wild with envy, netfulls of elvers being scooped out on the opposite bank.
I’d always imagined the Victorians with their engineering skills would have made great advances in draining and improving the Levels. But they didn’t. There was small progress but it was sporadic, scattered and often only maintained the status quo. Rivalries between vested interests frequently crippled any real progress. Projects and schemes abounded but were turned down or failed to materialise for lack of funds. A plan to improve the outfall of the lower Parrett, for example, in the late 1800s was firmly rejected by the owners of the slime batches – the works that produced the famous Bath Brick, a popular cleaning stone – situated along the banks in that part of the river. What was lacking was a coherent, integrated plan for the Levels. And so as projects and schemes came and went, so too did the winter flooding.
When exploring the moors slowly on foot or by bike, you become aware that they are a great patchwork, a spider’s web of works and installations old and new. They are a landscape bearing the imprint, layer on layer, of the centuries of effort to drain and manage them. What’s remarkable is that many of the older structures still operate and play their part in flood defence today. It reminds one of the insides of a great, intricate clock, ancient and rickety, that still works, mostly, but needs constant maintenance.
*****
Down the centuries the sea and the floods have come and gone, part of life, of living on the Levels, yet now and then over the years some have been so huge, so savage, as to be etched in the memory. It’s easy to forget that these days flooding is caused mostly by swollen rivers. In earlier times, however, it could just as well have been the sea. Sea defences in particular were often in dire need of maintenance, weakened by years of subsidence. Large parts of the Somerset plain are already below sea level; during big spring tides the sea could be fifteen or twenty feet higher. A breach in a sea wall could allow the tide to pour through miles inland. Terrible enough to be flooded by the river bursting its banks, it must have been utterly terrifying when the sea broke through the defences.
Just such a disaster happened on January 20th 1607 when the tide piled high by gale force winds tore up the Bristol Channel. A tidal wave of sea water breached the sea walls and rushed in for miles over the moor, flooding a huge area, catching people by surprise and causing devastation and loss of life. Some thirty villages were submerged, houses swept away, Glastonbury surrounded by sea water. In the whole Bristol Channel area two thousand or more people perished in the disaster. Though seen at the time as God’s warning to the people of England, it seems likely that the event was caused by a storm surge, a combination of high tide and wind driving the vast mass of sea water into the narrowing arms of the Channel so that it literally piled up and overtopped all defences.
In about 2004, however, fresh research came up with a new theory. Records at the time of the 1607 disaster mentioned the sea seeming to recede before coming in at incredible speed catching watchers unawares. As it advanced it seemed to throw off a fog of strange light, like sparks off the top of the wave. These contemporary descriptions, it was suggested, support the supposition that this might well have a tsunami caused by some geological collapse or shift in the ocean floor west of Ireland. Whatever the cause, it must have been terrifying.
In the porch of the peaceful little church at Kingston Seymour close to the coast, just south of Clevedon on the Bristol Channel, and scene of some of the greatest damage, a small wooden board records that ‘many Persons were drowned and much Cattle and Goods were lost; the water in the church was five feet high.’ It is signed ‘William Bower’. This simple plaque with its quiet voice from long ago speaks directly to us and somehow brings much closer the loss of life in that disaster.
Parts of the village were again flooded again in very similar circumstances in December 1981 when a combination of wind and tide caused a surge in sea levels adding four and a half feet to a 24-foot high tide. It overwhelmed seven miles of sea defences in the Bridgwater area, flooding 12,500 acres of land with great loss of livestock and it also flooded one of the reactors at Hinkley nuclear power station. Alongside the plant was Marine Farm, an enterprise set up in the early 1970s, using the waste heat from the cooling towers, to produce eels grown from elvers – baby eels – that we and others supplied each spring. One of the team working there on that day told me that he was at his desk in the office when he suddenly saw a wall of water bearing down about to engulf them. They just got out in time; the whole site was badly damaged.
This was all part of a particularly savage spell of weather that affected the south west of England. Just six days later on 19th December the Penlee lifeboat from Mousehole set out in hurricane force winds and huge seas in an attempt to rescue a stricken Danish vessel near the Wolf rock off the tip of Cornwall but she foundered and was lost with all eight members of the crew.
After 1607, nothing on this scale happened for nearly a century until the Great Storm of early December 1703 when the whole of southern England was hit by hurricane force winds that came in from the west, (not dissimilar to the Great Storm of 1987.) The damage was huge, some fifteen thousand lives were lost and many ships wrecked around the coast. In Somerset the sea swept in again and flooded miles inland, drowning people and thousands of sheep and cattle. Several ships were left stranded in the meadows around Bridgwater. At Wells Bishop Kilder was killed by falling chimneystacks from the palace roof as he slept. After the event Daniel Defoe produced The Storm in July 1704 in which he wrote that ‘no pen could describe nor tongue express it.’ Coastal towns looked as if ‘an enemy had sackt them’. He describes the terrific winds that destroyed hundreds of windmills; in some cases the sails turned so fast that the friction caused the wooden wheels to ignite and catch fire. As with the disaster of 1607, it was seen by the church to represent the anger of God against the sins of the nation.
Now we just blame the Environment Agency.
So the flooding went on down the years, a regular occurrence, a seasonal expectation, almost unremarkable, with only the more memorable events rising above the normal pattern. One of the worst floods in the early part of the twentieth century was in 1929 when the river Tone broke its banks and some ten thousand acres were under water from November to February, the villages of Athelney, Curload and Stathe all evacuated. In those days when a village on the Levels flooded, the warning up and down the road was the cry, ‘The bank’s gone, the bank’s gone,’ as the river – or worse still the sea – burst through a breach in the retaining wall, flooding cottages, farms, dwellings, spreading across the moor.
Again, what is remarkable reading accounts of these events is how long-suffering, how tough and adaptable people were in those days. If you grew up on the moors you were used to it, it was part of life.
*****
As human beings it is almost as if we need to log and name great natural events – The Great Flood, the Great Storm, the Great Snow – and to stow them in the collective memory to remind ourselves of the power of nature, perhaps also to remind ourselves how puny we are when nature brushes us aside, however much we might think we’re in control. These events act, too, as way-markers in our lives, useful pegs on which to hitch personal memories and dates. Our daughter, Emily, was born in February 1978 in the midst of the Great Snowstorm. They inspire in us also a sense of awe and wonder, they are the stuff of stories told through time by the tribe round the fire, the family round the table.
Floods have always made good stories. Like the tideline left by the high tide, flood waters very definitely leave their mark. Much more difficult to remember how strong the wind blew in the storm, whereas the height of the flood is left there on the wall, a lasting reminder.
