by Edward Platt
The maid and her boyfriend, who was the court minstrel, ran for their lives, the story says. They heard screams behind them, but they didn’t stop, and, when they looked back, they saw the waves racing towards them. They escaped to dry ground, and, at dawn, they saw that the palace had disappeared beneath the waters of the bay.
There are no comparable stories on the east coast. The archaeologist Vincent Gaffney tentatively attributes the absence of folk memories of Doggerland to cultural discontinuity, caused by successive waves of settlement and colonization. Native Britons were displaced by Romans, who were displaced by Anglo-Saxons, and each wave of invaders brought their own memories and overwrote those of their predecessors. On the west coast, where settlement was more continuous, memories of lost lands endured. The fact that it was lost more recently than Doggerland may have helped as well. Tacitus’ account of the Roman invasion of Anglesey in AD 60 testifies that the sea in the Menai Straits, where Tyno Helig was supposed to stand, used to be much lower. He said the infantry crossed in flat-bottomed boats, while the cavalry followed ‘by fording, or, in deeper water, by swimming at the side of their horses’. What’s more, Lavan Sands, or the ‘Place of Weeping’, as the intertidal area is called, was occupied in a way Doggerland never had been. In 1864, a man from Llandudno set out to look for the ruins of Tyno Helig, and found a seaweed-covered wall, and, in 1908, a geologist who had accompanied him on the original expedition came across even more substantial ruins. ‘The underwater archaeological evidence for former occupation . . . is compelling,’ writes Robert Duck. Yet I was more interested in the accounts of the way the land was lost, for I had heard similar stories of floods caused by the opening of a floodgate in several places I had been to in the last two years.
~
John Wynne-Jones saw the wave sweeping towards him as he stood on the raised bank of the River Elwy, in the North Wales town of St Asaph at ten past four in the morning, on 27 November 2012. Mr Wynne-Jones was a flood warden, responsible for implementing the evacuation plan for St Asaph, where he had lived for twenty-seven years.
Two days of heavy rain had triggered flood warnings on the Elwy, and Wynne-Jones had gone round the estate the day before, warning his neighbours that they might have to leave. Midnight was the cut-off point: if the river hadn’t flooded by then, they would be safe. John Wynne-Jones got the all-clear at half past eight, and passed it on to his neighbours. Yet he wasn’t convinced.
At midnight, he walked up to the river, which runs within half a dozen metres of the back gardens of the houses on the estate, and he could see that the water was still rising. Every twenty minutes, he checked the gauge beneath the massive concrete pillars of the flyover that carried the North Wales Expressway above the river and through the outskirts of town. At three thirty a.m., it was higher than it had ever been, but, even so, he was not prepared for what came next. It wasn’t just the force of the wave emerging from the darkness that shocked him – it was the direction. The Elwy, swollen by the water pouring off the sodden Denbigh Moors and obstructed by debris beneath the Spring Gardens footbridge, had backed up and reversed its course. In effect, John Wynne-Jones said, it had begun to flow upstream.
The ‘wall of water’, as Wynne-Jones called it, swept him down the path to the estate, and dumped him in the corner of the foaming pool that was spreading out towards his neighbours’ houses. It could have been worse: had he been a few metres closer to the footbridge, the wave would have carried him down the side of the bank, which was both footpath and defence, and trapped him in the dip at the bottom, against the fence that enclosed the back gardens of the nearest houses. He was convinced that he wouldn’t have been able to get out, and, when I met him, eighteen months later, on a warm, windless summer afternoon, he was still preoccupied by the narrowness of his escape.
St Asaph is dominated by the cathedral on the steep high street, which had earned it city status, and by the River Elwy, which winds through the fields and houses below. The name means ‘enclosure on the Elwy’, and a former mayor, who spoke with the soft Scouse accent that I recognized from my childhood on the Wirral, told me that most people were drawn to the town because of its riverside setting.
The pub where I met John Wynne-Jones, which stood on the main road into town, a hundred metres from the river, was one of many buildings that had flooded. The previous owners had sold up, but Wynne-Jones knew the people who had taken it on, and he often used it for meetings. He was a former town councillor, who had spent his working life in the NHS, but, these days, his time and energy were devoted to the flood and its consequences for the town. As soon as he walked into the refurbished bar, he started talking, nervously and compulsively, about the night he nearly drowned.
At first, I found it difficult to follow his descriptions of the landscape, which he seemed to inhabit constantly, and he took my notebook and sketched the configuration of river, road and bridges before we got in his car and drove half a mile downstream to see it for ourselves. We parked on the Roe Parc estate and walked up the path that had become a water slide on the night of the flood. It was the kind of path you see all over the country: a narrow strip, enclosed by overgrown borders and wooden fences, running from bollard to bollard, shaded by trees that made it feel dark and damp.
The river was very low – it came to the knees of the man fishing below the footbridge – and its murmur was overlaid by the chatter of gulls, who had made the short journey inland. The pillars of the flyover were fifty metres to the right; the concrete had begun to moulder and fade, turning the green-brown shade of the trees that overhung the river. It was cool and shady beneath the bridge, and, on the bank, the light was dappled by the shifting branches overhead. It seemed a peaceful place, to me, but it was evidently unsettling to John Wynne-Jones; he paced up and down the bank between the gauge and the footbridge, measuring the short distance between the top of the path, where the wave hit him, and the perilous stretch beside the fence, where he would have been, seconds later.
Yet it wasn’t just the nature of the flood that preoccupied him – it was its source. There was only one way to explain the sudden surge that nearly drowned him: someone had opened a gate in the Llyn Aled Isaf reservoir, which lay upstream, and released the tide of water that came crashing through St Asaph with such force that it turned heavy bins into floating battering rams and tore out steel railings. John Wynne-Jones did not want to criticize individuals – he was too polite and generous for that – but he believed that Natural Resources Wales was to blame, and he was not alone in holding bureaucrats responsible for a flood that overwhelmed his home.
~
Several months after the storm surge of December 2013 had passed down the east coast, I drove along the Wash with an official from the Environment Agency, who showed me the places where the water nearly broke through, threatening the fragile-looking holiday encampments that had sprung up on the shores in the estuary, in the same haphazard and defiantly idiosyncratic way they had in coastal Essex. It had been a close thing, he said. In some places, the water had broken through and got trapped in a gap between the outer line of defences and the newer ones, which had been built on higher ground inland, though people’s faith in their own security was so great that even those who lived in the shelter of the sea walls would not contribute to their upkeep. The Environment Agency couldn’t maintain them all; some would be allowed to lapse – though, in the short-term, at least, the stubborn spirit of the seaside settlement would save them: someone’s brother would turn up with a digger and they would build their own defences.
Yet the defiant self-sufficiency of the improvised coastal communities had its flipside in their suspicion of authority. In a previous job, when he was working on a river in Cambridgeshire, the Environment Agency official who had given me a tour of the Wash found himself arguing on live TV with a man whose house had flooded. The man insisted that the official had caused the flood by opening a floodgate and releasing the wave of water that engulfed his home. The official said h
e hadn’t, and couldn’t have, even if he had wanted to, for there wasn’t a floodgate on the river. ‘I know every metre of it,’ he said, on air, ‘and, if you don’t believe me, I’ll show you. We’ll get in my car and drive along the river, and you can show me the gate I opened.’ It didn’t make any difference; nothing could displace the notion of the spectral official cranking open a gate to release the flow of water that engulfed their homes.
I heard the accusation so often that I began to wonder whether people meant it literally or not. Shakespeare, the maker of so many phrases in our modern English language, was the first to use ‘opening the floodgates’ metaphorically. In Othello, Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, says his ‘particular grief’ at the news of her marriage,
Is of so flood-gate and o’erbearing nature
That it engluts and swallows other sorrows.
The idea was particularly apt in sea-threatened Venice, but it is now used to describe uncontrollable surges of many different kinds – outpourings, upheavals, and influxes, such as the imminent arrival of ‘floods of refugees’. I sometimes wondered whether people were not accusing the officials of releasing waves of water, but waves of care and sadness. Different eras succumb to different fears. In 1936, W. H. Auden wrote a poem called ‘As We Like It’ that evoked the anxieties of the years before the Second World War:
For the wicked card is dealt and
The sinister tall-hatted botanist stoops at the spring
With his insignificant phial, and looses
The plague on the ignorant town.
Yet the figure that haunts the contemporary imagination is not the malevolent scientist of the ‘low, dishonest’ decade of the 1930s, as Auden famously called it, nor the drunken embankment-keeper or the scheming suitor of folklore – it is the unaccountable bureaucrat, recklessly indifferent to other people’s safety.
~
Some people feared that gates or defences might give way of their own accord. Graham Chapman-Brice and his wife, Sarah, had already lost one farm to the Lake District reservoir of Thirlmere and they feared they might lose another. Sarah’s family had owned a farm in Wythburndale, the valley that was flooded in the nineteenth century to create the reservoir, and they now lived beside St John’s Beck, which was straightened and embanked to carry the overflow to Keswick.
The water had never reached their farmhouse, for it stood on a patch of high ground at the side of the valley, but their fields had flooded several times since they moved to St John’s in the Vale in the early eighties – 1985, 1995 and 2005, with ‘a few narrow squeaks in between’. Yet the flood of 2009, when Keswick was also overwhelmed, was unprecedented, Graham Chapman-Brice said, when I went to St John’s in the Vale on a rainy autumn day. He and Sarah were generous hosts. I had been told that she was a good baker, and the home-made bread and cake lived up to its billing. We sat in the kitchen, which was a light, airy room, with windows that looked up the valley towards the Helvellyn, and across the low-lying fields to St John’s Beck.
Sarah had ‘stupidly agreed’ to do a stand at the knitting and stitching show in Harrogate on Thursday 19 November 2009. She had taken the car out the night before, in the hope that, if she did, it wouldn’t flood, regardless of what the forecast said. Yet in the morning, the beck was already so deep that she had to get her son to take her across in the tractor. Normally, the clouds blow through, Graham said, but this time, the weather system stopped: ‘The rain arrived – and stayed: it rained and rained.’ It wasn’t raining very hard in Penrith when Sarah got there, and in Scotch Corner it was dry and sunny, but in St John’s in the Vale, they had a foot of rain. They estimated that 10,000 million litres overflowed from Thirlmere down St John’s in the Vale in one day. ‘The water comes so deep and so fast it is frightening,’ Graham and Sarah wrote in a collection of stories about the flood of 2009. ‘The entire valley fills and you would think it another lake.’
There had been storms before – Sarah remembered August 1967, when a cloudburst sank Borrowdale – and they weren’t sure whether it was getting worse. ‘We had a friend who lived here for a long time and he said, “We have never had a normal year,”’ Graham said. ‘I would say that it’s becoming more intense, but it’s hard to know – perhaps we are becoming more aware of it.’ Yet heavy rain only mattered if the reservoir was full and had no room to absorb it. ‘If the lake is low, we don’t flood, even if we have torrential rainfall, but if the lake is full, everyone is at risk.’ The local postman would check the level when he drove across the bridge in the morning, and pass on the news as he did his rounds – he’d say, ‘It’s two bricks down,’ or whatever it might be.
Outsiders recognize its destructive potential as well. In a poem called ‘Civic’, the Liverpudlian Paul Farley describes a walk through the predawn woods to the edge of Thirlmere, where he plans
. . . to break
the great stillness and surface of this lake-
cum-reservoir by peeing quietly into the supply.
He was impelled by ‘a keen sense of civic duty’, for he is a Liverpudlian, and the reservoir supplies Manchester. No one would be harmed by it, he says, explicitly dismissing the fear of the ‘tall-hatted botanist’ of Auden’s poem:
. . . no citizens
will draw a cold draught
of LSD, or run a hot bath
of nerve agent in two days’ time.
Yet, as he walks back to ‘the quiet road in the green shade’ he reaches a point where he looks out across a wall that holds back the water,
at chest height
and gasped at the thought of the pressure, the pounds-per-brick
resting against it. If the wall was to collapse, or there was a landslip on Helvellyn, the tidal wave would engulf the valley, generating more of ‘those rumours that seem to follow reservoirs around’:
a drowned village, church bells on rough nights,
the souls who stood their ground
calling from the depths.
The flooding of Wythburndale to create Thirlmere was controlled, but sometimes dams burst unexpectedly. Two hundred and sixty people were killed in 1864 when the Dale Dyke Dam in the Peak District burst, and there were fears that the ‘Great Sheffield Flood’ would be repeated in 2007, when the rain that flooded Tewkesbury and Hull tested the walls of the Ulley Reservoir. Each reservoir has flood inundation maps, showing what would happen in the event of a collapse, yet the people most likely to be affected are not encouraged to talk about it, Graham said. ‘It’s naughty and scaremongering and you get told to stand in the corner.’ In France, people who live within fifteen miles of a reservoir have sirens fitted to their houses, but the only warning the people who live beneath Thirlmere would get would be a message on Facebook.
~
The only authority that people seemed to have any faith in was the royal family. I had walked through Windsor as I made my way along the flooded banks of the Thames, in February 2014, and as I passed beneath the castle on the hill above the expanded river, I remembered the unlikely alliance between Prince Charles, Windsor’s resident architectural nostalgist, and a modernist architect called Darren Ward, who had worked together to restore the Cumbrian town of Cockermouth after it had flooded in 2009, in the storm that also overwhelmed St John’s in the Vale.
Darren Ward lived in an impeccably renovated house with a Le Corbusier print on the wall, in a narrow alley between the high street and the River Cocker. There had been warnings of heavy rainfall before the flood, he said. He had gone out to check the river level early, when the first warnings came through, and saw cause for concern. There had been warnings before, but, this time, the river was ‘looking angry – incredibly angry. And the Environment Agency people were looking very worried.’
Even so, the speed of the flood was a shock. Suddenly, the town filled with rapids. ‘It was so fast and dramatic, it was like a Hollywood disaster movie,’ the owner of the toyshop in the high street had told me. Water poured through the entrance to Cockton’s Yard,
where Darren Ward lived, as if the alley had become a hosepipe. On the night I was there, the lights in Cockton’s Yard had failed; it was so dark that I had to check the numbers on the door with the torch on my phone, and, when I turned back towards the high street, I could see light spilling through the gap between the shops, just as the water had done on the day of the flood. A wave, eighteen inches (forty-six centimetres) deep, chased Darren back into his house. Floodgates didn’t help; the water came through the front door, which opened straight into the whitewashed kitchen on the ground floor. He treated it as an inconvenience, at first. ‘I was like, “Oh my God! There’s half an inch of water in the house.”’
The water kept rising for the next ten hours. He was struck by the deafening roar of the river flowing down the high street. It was six feet (1.8 metres) deep and travelling so fast that the rescue teams couldn’t get their boats through it. They were going over the rooftops, identifying the houses in which people were trapped, but there were so many people in need of rescue that they couldn’t get them out straight away.
At one o’clock in the morning, Darren got a message saying that a helicopter was on its way, but, before it arrived, Mountain Rescue got a canoe through the narrow mouth of the alley. Even then, he decided to stay, as he couldn’t take the cat. He said he dived into the flooded kitchen to rescue a cheque he’d received from a client, and I assumed he meant it literally, for, when he got back upstairs, he realized he had used all the towels to stop the water coming in, and couldn’t have a shower. He sat on the first floor and watched the water climb the spiral stairs that he had renovated himself. ‘It makes you humble,’ he said. ‘It makes you realize that the world can just remove you without any concern whatsoever – if it wants to kill you, it can. I work for myself – I feel like I have total control of my life, and yet I felt totally powerless.’
