by Edward Platt
There were other patterns to consider, too. His group at Newcastle University was studying evidence that floods come in cycles or clusters, which may be related to the way that heat is absorbed and released from oceans: temperature oscillations in the North Atlantic mean there is ‘a kind of memory’ in the ocean that drives global circulation patterns. ‘So, you get more extreme weather for a period,’ he said. ‘People recognize that you get these periods like the mid-seventies, which was a drought period, and now we definitely seem to be in a wet period.’ He laughed, perhaps recognizing the scale of the understatement – though, its measured nature carried more weight. ‘So, there is probably evidence that things appear to be worse at the moment, but it might well be that, in five years’ time, we get a sequence where people are saying, “Well, last year there was a drought, this year there’s a drought. What’s happening? Is it global warming?”’
This was not a new insight, he added; people had known it since Biblical times – you get seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of drought. Edward Raikes had made a similar observation in the newsletter I had seen in the window of the library in Yalding: in the twenty years he had been measuring rainfall, he had noticed a seven-year or eight-year cycle, with highs in 1994, 2001 and 2008, though he added that it would be ‘imprudent’ to make predictions on the basis of so small a sample. Geoff Parkin concurred: there were so many ‘complex feedbacks’ in the system that no one understood how they worked. He did not want to say that the recent floods had been caused by global warming, but he did offer one general prediction: ‘There will be more extremes: there will be more floods, more droughts, and they will be more severe than they used to be.’
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I thought about the way Geoff Parkin balanced the risk of being flooded against his love of his riverside home as I travelled back to London from Yalding. Before I had started meeting people who had been flooded, it wouldn’t have surprised me to discover it was possible to treat the subject so calmly. But in the context of everything I had heard in the course of the year, it seemed extraordinary. As the train waited in the gathering darkness in a flooded wood, I wondered how many of the other people who had been flooded over Christmas felt the same way.
It was a long journey, for the train kept slowing or stopping. There were pools of standing water in the fields and the fairways of Kent, and I knew that nearby towns had flooded, including Tonbridge, eight miles south-west of Yalding on the River Medway. I had emailed Mary Dhonau that morning and she had advised me to stay away, as they were still clearing up. She had been in Boston helping with the recovery, and she was doing back-to-back radio and TV interviews – twenty-three on Friday, followed by more over the weekend. At that moment, she was waiting to do another. ‘I’ll have Christmas when this all calms down!’ she said. Yet there was no sign of when that might be.
More storms had been forecast to hit the east coast. While I was in Boston in December, I had picked up a leaflet warning of an even greater tide that was due to arrive in the new year. But the storms of the winter were nothing if not thorough: instead of forming in the North Atlantic and descending the narrow channel of the North Sea, they came from the other direction, striking the south and west coast and travelling north towards Scotland. Natural and man-made features of the landscape disappeared, sometimes overnight, when no one was looking, and sometimes live-streamed to a mass audience. Storm watching became a national pastime; marvelling at the people crouched behind harbour walls as waves towered above them was a secondary sport. Several people drowned, washed away from beaches and breakwaters. Chiswell, which lies on the inland shore of the Isle of Portland, had only flooded once since the great storm in 1824, when thirty people drowned, but on the night of 6 January 2014, it had flooded again.
The next day, I left London and drove down to the south coast. I had left my boots on the train on the way back from Yalding, and I stopped at a supermarket on the edge of Bournemouth to buy another pair. I was half expecting to be told they had sold out, or to find queues of people stocking up on tinned foods and other essentials, for the floods spreading across the south of England were also spreading a kind of minor panic: ‘Dorset was underwater as the county continued to be battered by wind and rain,’ said the lead story in the local paper.
The day before, I had seen footage of people gathering on the steps of a church opposite the River Stour, as the water rose towards a retirement park on the other side of the road, but they had gone by the time I got there, and the park was closed. I didn’t go past the chain that hung across the entrance, but I could see boxes stacked in the windows of the empty chalets. The river had gone down, leaving the pavements ribbed with silt, but it was still barely passing beneath the arches of the bridge. I followed a path through the wood beyond the park, splashing through pools of muddy water in the lime-green light beneath the trees, until I reached the edge of the fast-flowing river. It had seeped through the fence and filled the steps between the chalets. Garden gnomes and upturned chairs floated in the knee-deep water.
It was low tide when I got to Chesil Beach; the sea lay at the bottom of the steep shingle bank – though, two nights before, it had risen high enough to swamp the tombolo, the narrow shingle strip that connects the Isle of Portland to the mainland. It was fussing neurotically with the pebbles, picking them up as if to mould them together and throwing them back down with a discontented clattering. They were slick and polished, glossed in matching shades of blue, orange and grey. Rafts of weed drifted offshore, half hidden beneath the still surface of the water, and there were washed-out roots, like giant sticks of rhubarb strewn across the beach. A trail of wood, plastic bottles, shredded nets and plastic insoles ran towards a ruined pill box, as if they had burst from its collapsing interior instead of converging on it, on currents that had travelled across the Atlantic.
Further down the beach, I met a man from the mainland whose daughter lived in Fortuneswell, the main town on the Isle of Portland, with her mother. On the night of the storm, 6 January 2014, she had looked out of her window before she went to sleep and had seen water coursing through the streets below. At half past eight, the landlady of the Cove Inn had closed the shutters and gone upstairs to escape the six-metre waves. When I reached the pub, which stood high above the beach, in the village of Chiswell, I leant on the sturdy concrete sea wall and watched the surveyors measuring the new sea-sculpted profile of the shingle. The path inside the sea wall was littered with the stones the waves had flung against the windows.
Two days later, the sense of being under attack was fading. I had a drink and read the reports of the storm in the local paper. Then I climbed the coastal path past Chiswell Earthworks, which wind across the lower half of the cliff like frozen waves. Halfway up the cliff stood a school, which must have had the least impeded view in Britain; west of Portland, there is no land for more than 3,000 miles. The terraced houses had narrow gardens that ran like diving boards towards the cliff edge, and, further up, there was a basketball court set into a plateau below the quarried cliff top. I wandered round the white markings, imagining local kids shooting hoops or meeting to smoke and flirt, while, out to sea, ships passed unseen and storms gathered and dispersed, or turned to break upon the shingle below.
That night, I stayed in Dorset, near the source of the River Parrett, which runs past Thorney, and, the next morning, I drove north, into the flooded fields and lanes of the Somerset Levels, on the trip that took me to Thorney for the first time.
Part Two: Noah’s Woods
A noble figure he was, that great and wise Canute . . . trying to expiate by justice and mercy the dark deeds of his bloodstained youth; trying (and not in vain) to blend the two races over which he ruled; rebuilding the churches and monasteries which his father had destroyed . . . rebuking, as every child has heard, his housecarles’ flattery by setting his chair on the brink of the rising tide.
Charles Kingsley, Hereward the Wake
But I’d have you know that these wate
rs of mine
Were once a branch of the River Rhine,
When hundreds of miles to the East I went
And England was joined to the Continent.
I remember the bat-winged lizard-birds,
The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds,
And xsthe giant tigers that stalked them down
Through Regent’s Park into Camden Town.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The River’s Tale’
8: The Storm
THE SOMERSET LEVELS, 1603 & JANUARY 2014
I got to Burrow Mump two hours after the soldiers.
It was the end of January 2014. Two weeks had passed since I had drifted through Thorney in Glen Ward’s canoe, and the army had been called in to address the crisis in the Somerset Levels. Major Al Robinson and Sergeant Leigh Robinson of 24 Commando Engineer Regiment were the first to arrive, and they did what many do when they want to orient themselves in the flat fields of the Somerset Levels: they climbed the low hill that stands above Burrowbridge, eight miles upstream from Thorney, at the limit of the tidal inflows on the Parrett and at the centre of its man-made system of rivers and channels. Burrow Mump is only forty-five metres tall, but it is to the southern Levels what Glastonbury Tor is to the north, though its associations are more warlike.
Royalist troops are supposed to have sheltered in the ruined chapel on the summit of Burrow Mump in the Civil War, and, in 1948, the hill and the chapel were given to the National Trust as a memorial to the Somerset soldiers killed in both World Wars. The gate that leads from the village of Burrowbridge, which is set either side of the ruler-straight banks of the Parrett, is decorated with a sword. It must have made the visiting soldiers feel welcome, if they didn’t already. Their widely publicized visit was intended to reassure the locals that they hadn’t been forgotten, though it wasn’t clear how they were supposed to help. ‘They came, they saw, there was nothing they could do,’ the headline in the Western Daily Press would say, and when I reached the top of Burrow Mump’s muddy slopes and saw the lake spread out beneath me, I understood why they felt like that.
The lake lapping at the fringes of the car park, and rising up the southern slopes of the hill, stretched as far the Polden Hills. Trees and hedgerows signalled the boundaries of the submerged fields, but every other feature of the landscape had disappeared. Burrow Mump was on the north-east corner of the smooth grey sheet of water. To the north, the land was dry, apart from a few pools that marked out hollows in the fields, but, to the south and east, the water stretched as far as I could see.
Before I climbed the hill, I had crossed the brimming Parrett and walked west along the A361, the main road that runs out of the village, towards Athelney. The surface was so littered with grass and dirt that it seemed to be reverting to a track, and there were bricks and rubble piled on the verge, as if in readiness for repairs. The red ‘road closed’ sign on the edge of the flood seemed redundant; no one would have thought of driving into the murky green water, which got deeper quickly. The wavering white line on the tarmac disappeared within metres, and only hedgerows marked the route of the road.
Athelney was ‘the island’ in the Levels that King Alfred had retreated to after the Danish invasion of 875; it was described as the last safe corner of his kingdom, ‘surrounded on all sides by very great swampy and impassable marshes, so that no one can approach it by any means except in punts’. Exhausted and distracted by the campaign, he fell asleep and burnt the cakes that a peasant woman had asked him to bake, or so the story says. Three years later, he emerged from ‘the fastness in the Fen’, marshalled an army and defeated the Danes at the Battle of Edington. The floods had made Athelney as inaccessible as it was then, at least from Burrowbridge; the bevy of swans breasting the soupy green water in the nearest field stood a better chance of getting there than I did. The road north was closed as well, though the water hadn’t spread across it, or reached the houses that stood on its right-hand side, between the flooded fields and the brimming river.
From the summit of the hill, the raised banks of the river were the only dry land in sight, a narrow bulwark between the slowly moving stream and the lake below. Two hundred metres south of the town, another parallel line of trodden earth converged on the Parrett. The Tone, which is the main river in the western half of the Levels, used to flow further north, past Athelney, but, in 1345, the monks of Glastonbury Abbey diverted it into a man-made channel that brought it across Stanmoor to meet the Parrett, south of Burrowbridge. It was the first significant step in the draining of the Levels, and subsequent efforts had also centred on the drowned fields beneath Burrow Mump. The River Cary used to flow across the fields to the east to meet the Parrett near the place that the Tone met it from the west, but, in the eighteenth century, it was diverted into a man-made channel that carries it further to the north, and, since the 1970s, another man-made river, called the Sowy, has taken water from the Parrett to the sea by the same course.
I couldn’t see the man-made channel of the Sowy or the spot where it crossed the former route of the Cary, for it all lay beneath the water, but I had found a nice hand-drawn map that marked the route of the existing rivers in white, and the ghostly old ones in blue, and I sat down on the grass, with my back to the chapel, and tried to transpose the lines on to the grey sheet of water below.
It was half past two. I had stayed in Glastonbury overnight, and climbed the tor – Burrow Mump’s taller and more venerated twin – in the peaty, predawn light. The supermarket in the high street was open when I walked past, though the shops selling tarot cards and aura cleansing weren’t. I turned into a street lined with 1950s houses on the eastern edge of town. I passed an ashram on the side of Chalice Hill and followed a footpath to the road at the bottom of the tor, where a travellers’ bus was parked. Its windows were obscured by bags and boxes, and the soles of a pair of boots faced outwards above the passenger’s seat. The conical peak of the tor was silhouetted by the red glow of the rising sun. The steps cut into the path winding round its terraced slopes had been reinforced with concrete. A flock of starlings passed overhead, a dark shadow with trailing edges, constantly making and remaking itself. It was cold, even when the sun came up, and I sheltered from the wind in the ruined tower.
Queen’s Sedgemoor, to the north, and Kennard Moor, to the south, were dotted with pools of water, and the town stretched along a low promontory to the west. Beyond it lay the village of Meare, where the first settlements were established, in 400 BC, in huts built on earth-and-timber mounds in the middle of a lake. They were ‘a remarkable adaptation’ to ‘an adverse environment’, the geographer Michael Williams writes in The Draining of The Somerset Levels. Rather than attempting to drain the land, the inhabitants led ‘a semi-aquatic existence’, until the water levels in the lake rose and they retreated to higher ground and laid down a series of trackways across the marsh.
When Glastonbury Abbey was established in the fifth century AD, it looked out across 200,000 acres of waterlogged fen. It was ‘under water for nine months of every year, its still surface broken by clumps of alder trees, its waters alive with cormorants, pelicans, bitterns, otter and herons,’ Michael Williams writes. Yet the pre-drained Levels were not as barren as they seemed to outsiders, any more than the Fens had been, or the carrs of Hull. The locals cut turf and collected rushes, caught fish and fowl, and pastured their animals in the summer. Fearing the loss of the shared amenity on which they depended, the locals resisted the draining of the Levels, yet the abbey’s efforts to expand the areas of drained land and exploit the resources of the fens and pools were remarkably successful. When Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury, was hanged, drawn and quartered on the tor in 1539, the abbey was said to be the richest in England.
~
Leaning trees with short, fat trunks and thin, tufty branches grew out of the drainage ditches in the sheep-dotted pastures and peaty fields of King’s Sedgemoor, which lay between Glastonbury and the coast. They looked like truncated versions of
the plane trees that line the roads of rural France. There were black plastic rolls of silage in the fields and the yards were stacked with pallets. The King’s Sedgemoor Drain, which carries the diverted waters of the Sowy and the Cary, was full and fast flowing.
At Dunball Clyce, I dodged the fast-moving traffic on the A38 to reach the point where the King’s Sedgemoor Drain rejoined the Parrett. The narrow clay belt where I was standing was the only natural defence between the sea and the low-lying moors. It had been strengthened with waste called fly ash when the M5 was built along it, but it was still subsiding towards the softer, lower moors, which lie as much as fifteen feet (four and a half metres) below the average spring tide. Sluices like the one at Dunball Clyce – which can stop the tide flowing up the King’s Sedgemoor Drain – seal every river except the Parrett, though locking out the sea locks in the rivers. If the salt water doesn’t get you, the fresh water does. Sometimes, they both do.
On 20 January 1607, ‘the sea at a flowing water, meeting with land flouds, strove so violently together that heaving down all thinges yt were builded to withstand and hinder the force of them, the banks were eaten through and a rupture made into Somersetshire,’ according to a document called ‘A True Report of certaine wonderfull over-flowings of Waters, now lately in Summersetshire, Norfolke, and other places of England’. Two hundred square miles of farmland were inundated, and the water spread as far as Glastonbury Tor, fourteen miles inland. Two thousand people were said to have drowned. ‘In a short tyme did whole villages stand like Islands (compassed round with Waters) and in a short tyme were those Islands undiscoverable, and no where to be found.’